LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Cliap. Copyright N o. _ 

Shelf —^V:—^ C. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



REASON AND FAITH 




a 9. h-^i^ 



REASON 



AND 



FAITH 



BY 



REV. A. S/FISKE, D. D. 



NON IN SOLO 




PANE VIVIT HOMO 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 

THE NEALE COMPANY 

431 iiTH St. N. W. 

1900 



1 



UbPRpy «f Congpoas 

Two Copies Received 
OCT 22 1900 

C«pynght entry 

SECOND eopv. 

Ofiiv*f«( to 

ORDti^ O'A'ISION, 



>- 



-fs^ 



Copyright, 1900 

BY 

The Neale Company 



PREFATORY. 

This little volume is written with no theolog- 
ical or philosophic motive. It is largely but a 
retrospect of the painful steps by which one soul 
rose up out of angered and bitter depths to a 
rational faith and peaceful standing. Many in 
our time are dazed at the dark problems of this 
world, angered at its all-encompassing evil and 
doubting that it can be goodness which is throned 
over such domains. For those in such hard and 
honest case the Author has profoundest sympathy. 
It is in the hope that this book may suggest steps 
towards a reasonable light to some in such dark- 
ness, that he ventures to offer it to the public. 

He will be amply rewarded if it may be as 

'* Footprints on the sands of time, 
Footprints that perhaps another, 
Sailing o'er life's stormy main, 

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. 
Seeing, may take heart again." 

A. S. F. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Thk Atheistic Argument from the Exist- 
ence OF Evil 9 

II. The Tkeistic SoIvUTion of the Probi^em 

OF Eviiy IN the W0R1.D 22 

III. The Rationai. Ground of Christian v 

Faith 36 

IV. The M1RAC1.E Reasonable . . 55 

V. The Justification of the Unjust .... 69 

VI. The Wonder of the Word 85 

VII. Why I Believe in God 102 > 

VIII. A Conclusion of Sound Reason 115 ' 

IX. The Unity of Christ's People 127 

X. The Way of Certitude 141 

XI. Rkason and Faith 153 



J 



REASON AND FAITH 



CHAPTER I 



THE ATHEISTIC ARGUMENT FROM THE EXIST- 
ENCE OF EVII. 

The whole Creation groaneth and travaileth in pain 
together ujitilnow, — St. Paul. 

Sin in the individual soul, cherished, persisted 
in, practiced wantonly, is doubtless the keenest 
incentive to the denial of the existence of God. 
A holy, just, and almighty personal God, ruling 
and judging the world, is an intolerable thought 
to a consciously guilty violator of holy law ; and 
we can get rid of notions that breed horrors for 
us. But it is not my purpose to deal thus sum- 
marily with this vast and sorrowful business. 

Whatever the real motive to atheism, its argu- 
ment, its justification to reason, has ever been the 
evil of the universe. Nor is it strange that its 
cogency should be, to many, irresistible. The 
first attack, and that of most sweeping power, 
runs against the orthodox and historic proposition 



lo Reason and Faith 

of a unity of being and administration, through 
the universe and all stages of moral existence, 
which carries evil in character and estate over 
into the after- worlds. The argument runs, — let 
us put it as strongly as may be, — " It is impos- 
sible to believe, it is monstrous to affirm, that a 
good, wise and all-powerful God should create 
freely innumerable souls, endow them with fairly 
limitless capacity for happiness or misery, bestow 
upon them the awful gift of immortality, and 
then doom them to an eternity of woe, utter and 
remediless." 

If it be answered, ''He does not doom them 
so ; He simply gives them the choice of courses 
and lets them have their own way," the answer 
is short and sharp : ' ' But, though they have a 
certain freedom, it avails them little, for they come 
into the world by no choice of their own, with 
such physical appetites and propensities that they 
do, without exception, run into evil. Nay, the 
physical impulses and the selfish side are so much 
earlier in development than the intellectual or 
the moral that the selfish and the animal get fine 
start, controlling power, before reason and con- 
science come into the field at all ; and ever after 
they abide, a constant, besetting and inexpug- 
nable energy in all men. Then the material and 
earthly besetment is such as to be a perpetual 
and overmastering pressure towards evil. The 
collocation of individuals into families, groups, 
and races of kindred frailness and evil makes ex- 
trication from it so difficult as to be practically 



Reason and Faith ii 

impossible for even the stoutest souls. Orthodoxy 
admits that sort of impossibility. Moreover, sci- 
entific and philosophic observation make it certain 
that heritage from ill generations gone starts us 
with such bias of constitutional structure as to 
give no man born of woman a fair chance. So 
clear is this that all scientific, philosophic or theo- 
logical creeds have made this evil heritage the 
very basal point of their systems. The element 
of personal freedom is so encumbered by these 
sinister conditions as to be of very little account. 
As matter of fact, all races of men and all indi- 
vidual souls are, consciously and demonstrably, 
involved in evil ; and this evil is fatal, insomuch 
that all generations are merely born to die." All 
this, they say, is inconsistent with the idea of a 
free, good, all-wise and all-powerful God. Such 
a God would not, ought not, to have created such 
a race — a race of immortal sinners, to sin and 
suffer on forever. Yet here such a race is. There 
can be, therefore, no such God. So runs the argu- 
ment. 

Or, leaving the wider question of the eternities. 
* ' A good God of this world ? Look ! Johnstown 
there, a happy and prosperous community, over- 
whelmed by its flood. Those peaceful and indus- 
trious towns at the foot of one of Japan's glorious 
mountains. In a moment the mountain topples 
over upon them, destroying the villages and 
thousands of lives. Behold Chicago on fire. See 
the Yellow River — ' China's sorrow ' — her muddy 
waters full of tens of thousands of floating, ghastly 



12 Reason and Faith 

bodies of dead men, women, and children ! See 
millions perishing of hunger in India and thou- 
sands in Cuba. Remember Europe depopulated 
by the ' Black Death.' Hear the death shrieks 
ringing almost yet from all the fair valleys and 
rugged mountains of Armenia. Witness the 
furious devastations of war, the countless dead, 
the agonies of the mutilated, the anguish of the 
millions in the homes out of which all the glory 
and joy are gone. Watch the mother beside her 
darling who writhes and dies a slow death of 
agony in her arms, the innocent prey of torment 
for which she or all the world can do nothing ! 
Yet this God could, by an easy act of will, have 
prevented it all ! Nay, say this. A man takes 
another's life. He is a murderer, guilty of the 
supreme of ghastly crimes, is worthy of detesta- 
tion and of death, is not fit to live. Yet, see the 
generations die in pain, wasted by diseases offen- 
sive and intolerable ! What of your God who 
kills, by an ordinance that knows no exception, 
every man He has made ? He might have made 
them to live forever, or could just translate His 
children, in the midst of smiles and praises, to 
their happier climes, surrounding their depart- 
ures out of this to the worthier worlds with every 
token of love, joy, and blessedness. But how He 
does it! Your good God, indeed ! " Answer, 
if you will : ' ' All this is the play of law. ' ' 
' ' What of that ? Does that better the case for 
the lawmaker ? What He does by law. He does 
Himself. The builder of a bad law is worse than 



Reason and Faith 13 

the doer of a bad deed. Your God is the respon- 
sible author of all law, natural and moral, if there 
be such a God." 

Say: *' There is much of beneficence, happi- 
ness, true weal in the universe, perhaps more 
than of evil. " " But that is impossible to prove, ' ' 
they answer. Taking into account the absolute 
sway of death and the awful numbers who go out 
of this world after wretched lives, enmeshed in 
evil still, with fearful probabilities of evil futures, 
it can not be shown that the good overbalances 
the evil. 

' ' But why any evil at all ? Belittle it as you 
may, why this appalling sum of human suffering 
and ill, w^hich can not be disputed or made less 
than frightful ? Why, if God be great and wise 
and good ? ' ' 

So the tide of unbelieving challenge rolls on 
and whelms the faith of multitudes in our day. 
Not only do the IngersoUs exultingly cry, ' ' I 
could have done better, ' ' but throngs of humbler 
and more reverent spirits cry out in agony of 
mortal question. Multitudes doubt any God 
who do not deny Him. They shrink back and 
say, *'I don't know." They doubt, shrink and 
say — nothing ! They live on, doing as best they 
can, to meet what may be, with such hope as is 
possible in this deathful, rascal earth. What 
answer is to be made to this awful atheistic argu- 
ment, which does hold with a wide and ruinous 
grasp on the souls of many men of all classes in 
our time ? It is an imperious question which must 



14 Reason and Faith 

find answer, fair and frank and full, or ever the 
tide be turned. 

The first answer attempted is that of Material- 
istic Evolution — the answer of allowance — assent 
to atheism. " There is no God. There is, indeed, 
no soul. Intellect, will, feeling, love, loyalty, pa- 
triotism, heroism, worship, are all merely the play 
of the material atoms in the physical organism. 
When the organism goes to the dust heap all is 
gone. There is no good or evil, sin or holiness. 
There is no freedom of will. Everything is the 
play of automata, freak of fate. Matter, without 
God or soul, is merely playing out its nature." 
To be sure, there is sad puzzle as to how matter 
got its " Nature," or got to be at all, — whence its 
inherent ''I^aw" had origin. But that is of no 
consequence, since philosophy itself is but the 
inexplicable fracas of the material atoms of the 
brain, and rational cause there is none, and reason 
itself is but a phantasmal jargon of material stuiF 
in transient and chance activity. All this, indeed, 
so conflicts with the verdict of consciousness, 
so contradicts the facts of conscience and the 
phenomena of all society and life, so reduces to 
blank absurdity all the modes of possible social 
law, all the dicta of duty, reward and penalty, 
order and government, as to make it a miracle 
that any sane soul should hold it. Nay, to hold 
it, souls have to deny their own existence, leaving 
themselves without the faculties for either rational 
denial or afl&rmation of anything ; making all the 
pompous seeming of reason a sheer diddle of 



Reason and Faith 15 

automata. To one's wonder, those who hold 
the doctrine are always talking and acting, most 
absurdly out of all logical consistency, about free- 
dom and dignity and guilt and obligation, and 
right and wrong, and blaming and ridiculing 
people whose atoms don't play the fool just like 
their own. Let us laugh ! They have even held 
that the old notions of God and duty ought to be 
taught the average man for his restraint, as if 
automata could be taught ! as if there were any 
^' ought" at all ! 

A second answer has been made by affirmation 
that into this roil and moil of evil God has intro- 
duced a power to reverse and overcome it. That 
He has by His Son made it possible, even easy, 
for every man to be rid of the disorders of his na- 
ture by consent to its sublime re-creation ; to be 
rid of the curse of evil done, by repentance of it 
and its free, full pardon ; to be lifted into such 
right, loving, holy behavior and character as 
shall fit him for, and assure him of, an immortalit}^ 
of blessedness. That, so far, is well, were that 
the universal destiny. But this scheme of the 
Gospel was so long in coming and is, yet, so far 
from having come to all men — so many refuse its 
grace when they do know it, and go on all the 
worse for it ; it has, so, no advantage for so vast 
numbers of the human race ; so many have abso- 
lutely no chance at it ; so many candid spirits are 
perplexed by it — can not see their way to it ; 
it has visibly worked for relatively so few the 
great salvation ! Let now the largest answer be 



1 6 Reason and Faith 

made that is consistent with broadest orthodoxy, 
namely, that the vast multitudes who die in in- 
fancy receive its benefits. Nay, let it be said that 
the general work of the Holy Spirit reaches all 
races, even outside the specific knowledge of the 
Historic Christ, so preparing a multitude, how- 
ever great, to a grace by which they virtually 
receive Him, or do accept Him when, perhaps in 
the very hour of dying. He is revealed to them 
and so enter into glory renewed souls ; say all 
that, and that so the great majority of the hu- 
man race may have been saved. Say more, that 
in the long future of a rapidly evangelizing world, 
of a fully evangelized world, these majorities of 
the redeemed will sweep up to the huge out- 
numbering of all that ever have or ever shall miss 
the eternal salvation ; say all this, as orthodoxy 
does dare to say it, still that awful remainder — 
the whole of earthly suffering, the whole of the 
after-penalties of the unsaved ! Go outside of this 
orthodox answer. Say, with the Universalist : 
'' All men are to be saved at the long! last. Sin 
is to be punished here and hereafter ; but all 
punishment is remedial, and all will come home, 
at last, to God in peace and glory.'' Still the 
remainder! Earthly suffering in vast volume 
and suffering beyond the grave, how long and 
serious you know not ! Still the heart rises up in 
the face of Johnstown, beside the famine-stricken 
millions of India or the flooding woe of China's 
devouring river, or Armenian horrors, or Cuba's 
starving tens of thousands ; or beside the wan 



Reason and Faith 17 

face of the child in helpless agony, to demand, 
"How is this, if God be almighty, if God be 
good ? Man ought to have been made, if made 
at all, holy and happy here, and so forever to 
demonstrate the wisdom, power, and goodness of 
his Creator, nay, to prove His existence at all, or 
to make it possible to believe in Him.'' Unbe- 
lieving reason goes further and says, ' * In the day 
in which He made man, He, being infinite in 
knowledge and in power, must have foreseen all 
the issues of His creative work." There was no 
compulsion upon Him to create. Freely, of His 
own will, He created all, knowing all that should 
come of it, to every creature, as well as to the 
whole creation. In that executive act of creation, 
therefore, He did, in fact, determine all that was 
to be. In that Divine decree, which is not aflfirmed 
by revelation or in theology merely, but which is 
axiomatic in any philosophic thought of an all- 
knowing, creative God — an absolute postulate of 
theistic thought, all must have been determined. 
No use to say that you believe in an all-knowing 
and all-powerful God who, creating all things, 
did not know the issue of all things. That 
were to bar out from His infinitude the outcome 
of His own act, to cut ofi* from His all-knowledge 
the whole future of His own creation. You can 
not save his goodness by denial of His Deity. 
What a God you have, then, shorn, finite, bewil- 
dered, overwhelmed ! It is mental imbecility to 
say that a God who knew all futures, all issues 
of His creative act, then freely created, yet did 



1 8 Reason and Faith 

not determine the things that were to be. It is 
contradiction in terms, impossible to reason. The 
decrees of God are necessary to the conception of 
an inj&nite creative intelligence. He knew what 
was to be ? It '* was to be '' then ! Who settled 
that ''it is to be" ? Who but He who freely 
created the thing that *' is to be '* ? The decree 
of a foreknown creation was the decree of all that 
was to come of it, all that ever has come of it or 
ever will. 

Could we see, now, that all this creation were 
running well, working the weal of the orders of 
being which compose it, for the present and for 
the eternities, then we could have no trouble in 
the way of faith in God. Could we even see, 
through the veils and mists of present evil, suf- 
fering, sorrow, sin and death, surety of a to-mor- 
row of eternal weal for all, we could veil our faces 
before the mystery of the present and wait the 
unrolling of the scrolls of futurity, singing the 
songs of an assured faith and a grateful love. 
THAT we can not find in the revelation from 
which we learn all that we know of the future, 
most of what we know of God, and all that we 
know to alleviate the conscious and the observed 
miseries of this human life and death. That 
revelation has doleful voices of foreboding. 
Thunders of judgment reverberate through its 
corridors. The woes of the present waken echoes 
from within the barred gates of the grave. The 
chances that lie over there are the very motive of 
the revelation. The analogies of the present life 



Reason and Faith 19 

make fearsome suggestion of hurt for those who 
venture, sinful and unrepentant, out of this into 
the worlds to come. If so much of sin and the 
woe of it, covering, blighting, cursing life be per- 
mitted here, who is to say that, under the admin- 
istration of the same God, there is to be none of 
it in other and after worlds ? Who is to say that, 
under the fuller development of the evil that is 
regnant in many souls to the last of the earthly 
life, there is not to come in the long hereafter the 
fuller measure of ill which the fuller measure of 
developed desert must bring ? None has looked 
for ground of such affirmation in the Divine Word 
more eagerly than have I. None would rejoice 
more than I should such new light break forth of 
it. It does not. That it did not come when I 
waited for it long, flung me once, not into denial 
that there was any God, but into an awful hatred 
of Him. I could not deny Him but only His holi- 
ness and goodness. For, to deny His being, and 
see the universe shorn of all meaning, purpose or 
reason, bow down to the mere grind of luck or 
law that had no maker ; to see the races going to 
the dust heaps of the ages without significance ; 
to hear mankind wailing its woes and raving its 
wraths and mooning its inane laughters out upon 
the mere grind of a soulless fate or an idiotic 
chance, which grinds us all to death and obliv- 
ion, — O that were too ignoble, too horrible! 
That were worse than any hell ! To believe my- 
self and man nothing ; to learn that honor, virtue, 
heroism, worship — all that makes for dignity and 



20 Reason a7td Faith 

worth in man — are phantasms, of no more qual- 
ity than the craving of hunger or of lust, or than 
the automatic convolutions of the worm beneath 
your foot, this is to deny every conscious fact of 
your own constitution and of the society of man, 
is to degrade and deny yourself ! 

But here the evil is. Here are we in it, for in- 
dubitable and awful fact ! To deny the existence 
or the goodness of God abates no jot of the 
horror, but adds the element of an absolute hope- 
lessness, — a blank despair. If there be a God 
who can overrule, we find a ray of hope. If a 
God wise, mighty, and good, there may be com- 
plete relief for reason and sanity. There must be 
such a God or the universe is without reason, — 
an unmitigated terror, and the ending of it by 
universal suicide and oblivion the only rational 
hope. Our disbelievers cut us off" from that by 
telling us that matter is eternal, was never created 
and can never cease its cursed play. From this 
grind of aimless and hideous curse, I flee to God 
as the only escape from madness ! 

Here the evil is. We are all involved in it. 
And here God is. There must, then, be some 
theory of the universe and the permission of evil 
in it couvsistent with these facts, — sinful and suffer- 
ing man and a holy, almighty, all-wise and all- 
loving God. If this permitted evil shall prove, 
after all, but the mode and necessary process for 
the development of the loftiest of possible created 
moral Being and definitely designed to effect it, as 
I suppose and will try to show, we can unite in 



Reason and Faith 21 

exultant Hallelujahs to His great and blessed 
Name. The evil and suffering of the worid shall 
redound to the glory and joy both of God and 
man. 

After all, I can only close as I began. The 
common, practical source of atheism is no specu- 
lative diflSculty, but consciousness of guilt and 
free refusal to turn from it. That consciousness 
raises the certainty that, with a holy God reign- 
ing and judging, it will go hard with guilt every- 
where and forever. So men can and do fight 
down and out their own intuitive and rational 
certainty that there is such a God. In so far, 
atheism is sin. To live in God's world, the life 
He gives and sustains, as if there were no God, is 
easily the supreme of all evils that are in the earth 
and the source of all the curses of time and of 
eternity, — occasion of all the wailings that have 
been, are, or shall be. 



22 Reason and Faith 



CHAPTKR II 

THE THKISTIC SOI.UTION OF THE PROBLEM OF 

EVIIv IN THE WORI.D 

Who are these which are arrayed in white robes ? and whence 
came they? These are they which came out of great tribula- 
tion^ and have washed their robes and made them, white in the 
blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of 
God, and serve him day and night in His temple ; and He that 
sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hun- 
ger no more, neither thirst a^iy more: neither shall the sun 
light on them nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the 
midst of the throne shall feed t-hem, and shall lead them unto 
living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears 
from their eyes. — St. John. 

Many kindly and thoughtful souls, touched by 
the miseries of this present life, and haunted by 
the dread consequences of evil in the eternity that 
is coming, — wretchednesses which do visibly har- 
row with tribulations multitudes here, and which 
do, presumably, hang over the future of so many 
of our fellows, — are ever standing, perplexed and 
baffled, before the agonized question, *'Why is 
evil permitted in the universe?" Failing of sat- 
isfactory answer, from the doors of that awful 
problem multitudes have been thrown into anger 
against the very order of the world, into denial of 
the inspired Word, into refusal to believe even in 
the existence of any God at all. With Huxley, 
they say, ''Since thousands of times a minute, if 
our ears were sharp enough, we should hear sighs 



Reason and Faith 23 

and groans of pain like those Dante heard at the 
gates of hell, the world can not be governed by 
what we call benevolence." At any rate, they 
are tossed into angry rejection of the doctrine of 
any persistence of evil and misery beyond the 
grave, or, like Tyndall, into a confused agnosti- 
cism in the whole sphere of religious and, some- 
times, of moral truth. The strain which this fact 
of evil puts on the hearts of all men and upon the 
faith of many is almost or altogether too heavy 
to be borne. 

But here the evil is past contradicting. Here 
it has been from earliest history and reaching out 
into the future of this world, ravenous as ever, 
and here it is as a foreboding of the eternities, in 
spite of us. It must be consistent with some 
scheme of the universe. What scheme, then ? A 
chance universe ? Too much of plan, order, ad- 
justment of means to ends for that, and too much, 
I may say, of hopeless horror for any soul to let 
it rest in that. Fate ? That answers no question, 
for a fate requires an arbiter of fates, a God ! A 
malignant Power, then, over and under all ? Too 
much of beneficence, of wisdom, power, and skill 
directed to world's weal for that. The normal 
order of Nature is for weal. On the whole, the 
vast majority of men are glad that they live, have 
lived, and are to live yet. After all, men do, 
almost universally, feel that Goodness is on the 
throne. Hardly a blasphemer in his wrath is 
able to say, ' ' This Power of the universe is ma- 
lignant, and the God is the Devil ! '' 



24 Reason a?id Faiih 

Well, then, is it a God who, having made the 
world and set it running, then retired from busi- 
ness, out of all its processes, and left it alone to 
work out its own destinies ? Hardly that. He 
could not do that. He could have had no right 
to do that. He must, creating, have known all 
the issues of its evil ; could have had no right to set 
it out and let it run its course of evil, unobstructed 
and uncared for. On such terms, it is not irrev- 
erent to say, ' ' He had no right to create at all. " A 
God were that like the creator of the Frankenstein, 
with a horrible and uncontrollable thing for a 
universe on His hapless hands to mock His pow- 
erlessness or His heartless unconcern. Either the 
Creator can interfere and will not, or He would 
interfere and can not. In either case He were 
something else, and other, than our God. 

What theory of the creation is left, then ? 
Only this, that a wise, good and almighty God, 
creating, set afoot the best, worthiest, loftiest 
scheme of things that could be and presides over 
it for its highest welfare. I can see no other 
alternative. Still, this evil is here and often in- 
tolerable and overwhelming, 

I^et us go reverently back past the ages, beyond 
the stars, into the Eternity when none but God is. 
He alone fills immensity. But his soul stirs in 
creative purpose. Somewhat shall be beside him- 
self. Somewhat, then, worthy of Himself, the 
highest and best then of creative possibilities. 

This work of a Creating God, — what will it be ? 
No wonder of worlds beautiful as earth and stars 



Reasoji and Faith 25 

will be lacking or sufl&cient. They will come into 
being and harmonious order. They will be filled 
and clothed with every exquisite class of vegetable 
life, springing from every fitness of earth and soil 
and water and air and light and heat for their 
growth and splendor. But all is insentient still, 
so not the highest. All good in its realm, but not 
the best that can be. Sensation, motion, intelli- 
gence wait. So then the multiform and beautiful 
orders of animal life, exquisite in structure, keenly 
alive in sensibility, amazing in power and variety 
of function. A wonderful world of life teeming 
in water and air and over all lands. Every mote 
or mammoth contributes a definite sum of pleasure 
to the volume of the enjoyment of the universe 
and, so, a definite element of motive to the creative 
plan of a God who loves happiness and creates it 
and for it. But, after all, is this an object ample 
enough to become THE motive in this immense 
visible creation ? Certainly not, if aught higher 
be possible. And higher there surely is. He 
Himself is intelligence, free and holy. He is 
goodness, love, character. He is a free moral in- 
telligence, acting, that is, always under the clear 
discrimination between right and wrong and al- 
ways with the right. Now the crown and motive 
of this new and grand creation shall be a thing 
created, indeed, and so finite, but created in His 
own image — a royal creature, with power to dis- 
criminate between right and wrong, like Himself, 
under all the obligations of righteousness, and 
with a free will to act in view of this eternal dis- 



26 Reason and Faith 

tinction so in His Image. A creature this shall be 
with capacity of vast intelligence, with indefinite 
possibilities of culture and growth, with keen sus- 
ceptibilities to pleasure and pain, all fitted for in- 
definite development, with an eternity of time and 
a universe of opportunity for it. A creature, this, 
capable of all the grand passions of love and joy 
and beauty and holiness ; of a grandeur in being 
only less than His own as the finite must be less 
than the infinite, and like himself in character. 
A Being, a Character, — grandly worthy of love, 
for society with Himself in interplay of holy sym- 
pathy and fellowship forever ! 

An exquisite machine is admirable, but can not 
elicit respect or affection. We can not enter soci- 
ety or sympathy with it. A beautiful and grace- 
ful animal is admirable and you may come to love 
it in a way, but it can never win your respect, your 
love in the higher human and moral ranges of it. 
The difficulty is that it can not achieve character, 
has no morality, is below the ranges of the higher 
being. Character only can aspire to moral praise 
or blame, to be respected, honored, loved. No 
creation, save one crowned with a race capable of 
character and of grandeur in it, would have been 
at all worth a creator's while. That is what we 
want to find for object and sovereign in this crea- 
tion, and that is what we find in man, — a soul 
capable of character, and majesty in it, immortal 
and equal to the fortunes of an infinite spiritual 
universe. Character is the thing essential. 

What, then, is essential to character? First, 



Reason and Faith 27 

an everlasting and necessary distinction between 
right and wrong, a distinction of contrast in the 
very nature of things. Second, an intelligence 
capable of discriminating between them. Third, a 
discriminating intelligence which must ever recog- 
nize its obligation to the right and the personal 
guilt of wrong-doing. And, fourth, freedom, 
under that sense of obligation to choose at will 
the one or the other. These are the essentials to 
character-making. Without them, or either of 
them, character is impossible and morality a phan- 
tasm. This style of being, given the law of growth, 
time and opportunity, will come to grandeurs 
enough to account for and reward any lavishness 
of expenditure on the creation of which it is the 
crown, and the scheme of things that shall accom- 
modate and develop it. 

This we should rationally forecast as the creative 
design, and this, as matter of fact, we find. 

Evil, then, in a moral universe ? Its possibility 
is the forever-necessary condition of morality. A 
moral standard is a necessity, with moral con- 
trasts. A moral universe is inconceivable without 
it. In order to moral character, there must for- 
ever be an evil at hand which the will may choose 
and follow if it so elect. A possible evil to be 
wrought and a will forever free to work it, is the 
absolute condition of virtue. Annihilate that 
possible evil and that free will and you sweep out 
the very idea of moral character. There is no 
virtue in, and no praise for, going one road when 
you must go and there is no second way to choose. 



28 Reason and Faith 

There is no character in doing the right when you 
must do something, and there is nothing wrong 
which you can do. The praise and worth of 
character is that it sturdily takes the right when 
it might have taken, and had mighty temptation 
to take, the wrong. Liberty to, or prohibition of, 
wrong are alike temptation to it. 

God, then, in order to character in His Universe, 
must leave every candidate for its honors or its 
shame, free to choose either good or evil, — free, 
everywhere and forever. The great poet states 
the case with fairness and power. 

** God made man just and right, 
Sufl&cient to have stood, tho' free to fall. 
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere 
Of true allegiance, - — constant faith, or love, 
Where only what they needs must do appeared, 
Not what they would ? What praise could they receive 
When Will and Reason , of freedom both despoiled, 
Made passive both, had served necessity, 
Not Him ? . . . He, else, must change 
Their nature and revoke the high decree. 
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained 
Their freedom.— Par. Lost, Book IH, 98." 

This line of thinking for me, long a restless 
and angry wonderer at the gates of this mystery 
of permitted evil, settled the question. If any 
real moral universe, then evil must be forever 
possible to every moral being. If possible, and 
the freedom of action be real, then, in the multi- 
tude of free souls, amidst the infinitely numerous 
contingencies which surround action, the actual 
commission of evil is nigh to an absolute certainty. 



Reason and Faith 29 

In the innumerable choices of free souls the tre- 
mendous probability — the moral certainty — is 
that every one of them will, some time, fall into 
evil. 

But then my soul fled, angered, backward into 
raging protest : ' ' God had no right to create a 
moral order at all, seeing it must involve this 
fearful fact of actual and mortal evil ! '* Well, 
then, He is holy, wise, and good and did do it ! 
That, may be, ought to settle it, — for faith. 
But it is too summary for any other state of mind. 
It will not answer at all for many eager and sensi- 
tive spirits, in deep waters of doubt and trouble. 

Let us try a further line of thinking, which has 
brought to one soul, at least, a final and a vast 
relief. If God intends the very highest order of 
finite being, how shall He get it? I suppose, 
perhaps am bound to suppose, that the highest 
possible work of mere creative power and wisdom 
was wrought for souls in physical conditions, 
when he produced in the garden of the world a 
moral being stainless and equipped for eternal 
development in intelligence, power and holiness. 
Character, as we have seen, is the result of free 
and intelligent choice between good and evil. 
Character, in this sense, is no more a possibility 
to creative power than is an after without a before, 
a two without a one, or a round square. A result 
of experience can not be created without the ex- 
perience, nor the result of choice without the 
choice, and character is a result of choice. What 
God did create was innocent souls, in exquisite 



30 Reason and Faith 

bodies, in a world fitted for their grand develop- 
ment, with all motive to it and immortality and 
other worlds for eternal growth. But now in 
order to character a free and established will, 
to choose forever the thing that is right, — that is, 
and forever must be, left for the actor to develop. 
It can be created only by the action of the free 
soul. To establish such a will, — such a charac- 
ter, — free action is necessary. To establish it in 
its most regnant and stalwart estate what can be 
so sure a process as an observation, nay, as an 
experience, of the opposite effects of right and 
wrong-doing and being ? For the secure suprem- 
acy, through all worlds and eternities, of personal 
righteousness, what should be such buttress as 
actual vision of the curse and ruin of evil ? What 
save the personal experience of its handling, the 
suffering of it, the mighty wrestle with it, and 
the final overcoming of it ? This should bring, 
shall bring, must bring, the soul that has made 
the grand fight, and come through it into the 
perfectly pure likeness of Christ, to a grandeur of 
moral estate inconceivable on any other terms 
whatever. It knows sin, has seen and felt the 
horrible curse of it, has taken up arms against it, 
laid hold of almighty grace to battle with it, has 
overcome, and stands now perfect and radiant in 
the Christ's likeness ! That is the highest type 
of character — the character our God is going to 
establish, is establishing, has been through the 
ages establishing at the top of the universe, 
through experience of sin and victory over it. 



Reaso7i and Faith 31 

These redeemed shall ''judge the Angels" ! The 
song of their final exultation is to be on so fine and 
high a key of love and gratitude, of experienced 
grace and of holy joy, that none but they can ever 
learn it. None others have had the thrilling ex- 
perience of which that ecstacy is born. For none 
others did the Christ even dare to die. Of none 
others is it written, " God so loved " ! For them 
alone — the Blood-washed — was that manifesta- 
tion, impossible save in sacrifice for the redemption 
of sinners. For them the Robes of Whiteness, the 
Crowns of Splendor surpassing, the very Likeness 
of the Christ ! These, so redeemed, shall move 
amidst all the worlds forever without faltering 
or falling. Adam, the innocent, fell. Sinless 
angels lost their first estate when their trial came. 
These will never fail. They know sin and have 
found the august power now, serenely and joy- 
fully to overcome it. The Jasper Walls and 
Pearly Gates and mighty towers of the Heavenly 
City are not the defense of Christ's redeemed be- 
cause they shut them in from temptation and 
wall the Devil out. Their eternal security is in 
their armed and panoplied, their tried and per- 
fected, character, as safely to be trusted now as 
the Christ's own, everywhere and forever. 

In the very structure of character, love, grati- 
tude, sympathy and devotion are the most power- 
ful elements. In this Divine work of redemption 
from sin our God reveals Himself to the universe 
and to sinners in such grace and glory of love, in 
such relations of Saviour, sacrifice, sufferer, helper, 



32 Reason and Faith 

friend, as can exist between Him and none but 
sinners. They are brought nearer to His heart 
by the Cross and agonies of their salvation and in 
all the great history of their Sanctification than, 
so far as we can know, other souls have ever 
come. By the awful depths of their experienced 
ruin and the magnificent heights of their achieved 
redemption, by the agonies of the love that saved 
them, they stand forever in a gratitude far beyond 
that which the experience of any others, so far as 
revealed to us, can occasion. So we are permitted 
to see how it is that of them alone it is said, * * they 
are Sons of God,'' "they are joint heirs with 
Christ," are ''to sit down with him in his 
Throne," are to be "like Him when they see 
Him as He is " ! " O beata culpa, quae mihi 
talent Salvatorem Meruisti! '' (" O happy sin 
that hath deserved for me such a Saviour ! ") 

It seems to me clear, then, that in free moral 
being, coming out of sin through the strenuous 
conflicts of Christ's Redemption, given to play of 
these supreme passions of love, gratitude, and 
devotion to Christ its personal Redeemer, exer- 
cised by a new fervor of love to man and hearty 
endeavor to save him into blessedness for this life 
and the next, nourished by the sweet sympathies 
of all souls passing through a like experience, 
walking in the personal fellowship of Jesus here 
and given an Eternity for holy growth, we have 
the most perfect conceivable conditions of the 
highest possible finite grandeur — the certainty of 
the being who shall best satisfy, delight and 



ReasoJi a7id Faith 33 

glorify the God of Creation and Redemption. If 
so, the problem of evil permitted in the world is 
solved, and the Creation was well worth while and 
ought to have been set afoot. 

If, now, our God is going to develop vast mul- 
titudes into this splendid and eternal grandeur 
and felicity, as we do believe is to be the case with 
the immense majority of the human race, why, 
then, Glory be to His holy and blessed Name ! 
I might stop here, but will not, for now you chal- 
lenge me with the other side, — the characters that 
go on in sin, unredeemed and irredeemable, — that 
awful other side ! It must still be said, '' they are 
free." They have their own way, make their 
own choice. All of them, in Christendom at any 
rate, might have been redeemed but would not. 
All of them outside of Christendom would doubt- 
less have been saved had they but lived up to the 
light they had ; may, for aught we know, have 
been redeemed in multitudes. O, the sheep which 
Christ had ''not of this fold " ! 

Another thing is to be said, needs saying with 
infinite emphasis, to all orthodoxy. No soul, not 
one, in Christendom or out of it, will ever get in 
any eternity one hair's breadth, or one feather's 
weight of evil, beyond that which he actually de- 
serves, after every apologetic circumstance is 
given its full, generous allowance. Not one un- 
fair pang will come to any unsaved soul through 
the eternities — not one which itself, or the uni- 
verse of just and gentle spirits will think to be 
undue. There will be no accusations of God's 



34 Reason and Faith 

justice or goodness even among the unsaved. 
Not one of all souls would choose to have its free 
will, and, so, its moral being annihilated. Every 
man could have been saved if he would, and no 
man wants to be saved against his will. No man 
anywhere fails of salvation unless he freely chooses 
recognized sin and persistently follows it. None is 
lost through honest mistake or misunderstanding. 

That in a moral universe free evil doing should 
not entail sorrowful consequence, were both ab- 
surdity and outrage, upturning the moral system, 
defeating and abolishing it. Evil consequence 
must beset free evil character everywhere and al- 
ways, so long as that character persists ; forever 
if that character be finally fixed. That would 
seem an axiom to sane minds. Unless somebody 
can prove for us a redemption of character at or 
after death, which proof is thus far sought in vain, 
then the presumption must be that evil experiences 
pursue evil character hereafter, as here, through 
the forever of evil doing and evil being. But, as 
I have said, this pursuit will never be for any soul 
arbitrary, vindictive, nor sharper than absolute 
desert, with all mitigating conditions taken into 
full account. The lost estate of one soul will be 
a very different thing from that of another, ac- 
cording to the just measure of differing deserts. 

One thing more. That in a world where every- 
thing is tainted with wanton sin, anything should 
be wholly free from the pain which is the trail of 
the serpent, were a thing inconceivable to sanity. 
That even the innocent should suffer by conse- 



Reason and Faith 35 

quence of the sins of the guilty in this world of 
close-knitted society is inevitable, and only a part 
of the wide experience of the horrible nature, 
heritage, and contagion of evil which must be re- 
lied on to teach the supreme abhorrence of it and 
nerve to bravest fight against it. If, now, our 
God so adjusts things that for every redeemed 
soul and every innocent suflFerer there shall come 
ample compensation for all of earthly pain and 
sorrow in the added glories of the eternal future, 
there can be lodged against him no complaint. 
Of that added ' ' weight of glory ' ' there is full 
promise in the Gospel of our Blessed God. 

Finally, here the sin and sorrows are. Con- 
cerning them but the four theories already men- 
tioned are possible, — Chance ; Malignant Deity ; 
a God fallen asleep, careless or unable ; or the 
Providence of a Benignant Heavenly Father, who, 
through all mystery and darkness, is working all 
things together, from the dawn of creation to 
high noon of the heavenly splendor, for the 
highest weal of His creatures. One or other of 
these theories you must take. As for me, the 
last is mine ! It only is consistent, as I see things, 
with either reason or morality, with revelation or 
rational theism. To take either of the other no- 
tions ought to drive a man to the mad-house. 
In this you shall find peaceful and adoring rest of 
reason and of faith, — a blest harmony of the 
universe, yourself and God. Into that holy peace 
may we all enter and in it abide ! 



36 Reason and Faith 



CHAPTER III 

THK RATIONAI, GROUND OF CHRISTIAN FAITH 

Be ready ^ always, to give an answer to every man 
that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you. 

— St. Peter. 

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shall be 
saved. — Sr. lyUKK. 

BkliKVK ! The Gospel magnifies faith. Its 
salvation is by faith. This Christian believing is 
often taunted as "blind, unreasoning." Denial 
of the Christian faith likes to st34e itself "ration- 
alism." Disbelievers boast themselves "free- 
thinkers, " as if we were cut off from free thinking 
and they had a monopoly of it. That is voluble 
anti-Christ slander, despite any action of any 
ecclesiastical assemblies of this or any age — 
slander to be resented and resisted, indicted for 
public judgment and mulcted in damages. We 
declare that we are, and ever will be, free-thinkers, 
rationalists par-eminence. The corner-stone of 
Protestantism is its appeal to private judgment, 
to individual reason. Its great battles are all 
fought out on that line, through the summers and 
winters of the centuries, are, have been, are to be. 
Its literatures are a vast and mighty argumenta- 
tion. Its name and history are protest against 
prescription of faith or proscription of "free 
thought. ' ' The old injunction, ' ' Prove all things, 



Reason and Faith 37 

hold fast to that which is good/' i. e., that which 
stands the test of keen sifting, was laid on the 
world, not by the new disbelievers, but by the 
Great Apostle of the most rugged faith. It has 
been Protestant law and practice from the first. 
Hold fast in faith and firm in behavior, that which 
weathers all stress of crucial question ! Be able 
and be ready to make fair answer of reason for 
your faith to every man that challenges, is the 
immemorial order of the Gospel. 

Faith is not credulity — the acceptance of a 
thing without or contrary to reason. Processes 
of reason reach it and substructures of reason sus- 
tain it. Faith is built on rational induction from 
what seem to the believer well-attested facts. 
Some things for foundations we know by con- 
sciousness, indisputably. Some we take for fun- 
damental on testimony, reasonably sifted. Others 
we reason out, logically, from established data, 
and so put into the structure of our vital faiths. 
But every Christian faith has been reached and 
held by title of the most deliberate and thorough 
processes of reasoning which its holders could 
master, and has been championed by the learning 
and argument of the ages. Nothing has been 
taken for granted. How could it have been ? We 
have staked our highest, uttermost, present and 
eternal, all on these issues of faith. Men, races, 
nations, and those most forward in intelligence, 
enterprise, science, philosophy, and soundness of 
mental and moral fiber, — in genuine nobleness of 
manful quality, — in obedience to these faiths 



38 Reason and Faith 

have laid aside their venerable past, the traditions 
of a revered antiquity, their personal, social, moral 
and national customs. They have done it, not 
in masses and, so, easily, as waters in a body when 
the crevasse opens — but one by one, each soul for 
itself, shaking oflF its old habits, cutting loose 
from its past, and from its present environments. 
They have done it often with fierce inward con- 
flicts. Often through bitter outward opposition, 
through scorn and contempt and outcasting from 
circles of kindred and friends, through hatred, 
malignity and deadly persecution have they come 
to their new faith and obedience. No man can 
picture, can conceive, the crucifixions of inward 
agony and outward conflict which have marked 
with bloody sweat these conversions from the old 
heathenisms to the new faiths, all along the story 
of Christian progress. Millions have ventured, 
have suffered, loss of country, home, estate, good 
name, life itself — through horrors of martyrdom — 
for their new believing. Now face it ! Have 
these best and noblest races, these purest and 
wisest of men, done all this, endured all this, 
think you, without the deepest and most intense 
exercise of reason concerning the facts of their 
faith ? It is credulous, vicious, infamous outrage 
on all that is humanly decent to affirm it. It is 
to profane the graves and deride the memories of 
the generations of our great ancestry, to blaspheme 
the most heroic movements of the mind and heart 
of the human race to do that. Vilifiers, have done ! 
Hold your sacriligious tongues from defaming the 



Reason ajid Faith 39 

holy dead who have agonized the world up to its 
high estate and the holy living who are yet press- 
ing it up to loftier triumphs in the heroisms of a 
faith born of purest reason ! 

Why, to-day it costs to turn from worldly, sen- 
suous or selfish living, from some scientific, lit- 
erary, or social ambition to a simple, loyal obedi- 
ence to Jesus of Nazareth. Costs fight with self, 
conflicts of soul and a world of oppositions and 
finger pointings from without. Let some man of 
the world go down, to-day, to his club and tell 
them that he is seeking the pardon of his sins and 
turning to Christ his Saviour. Will it not cost ? 
It were hero-work ! Would any venture that 
save in obedience to the profoundest rational con- 
viction ? I trow not ! Let some skeptic go to his 
skeptical club with such an announcement. 
Could he do it without the power behind him of a 
mighty conviction of the verity of the despised 
faith ? I suspect that Charles Reed never did an- 
other thing half so heroic, or that cost him half so 
much, as the avowal of his discipleship at the feet 
of Jesus. Ouida was more a heroine turning 
from her sensational fiction to the bosom of the 
Church of Christ than ever she pictured in her 
stories. 

Let a young man here in study, his ambitions 
and enthusiasms kindled for, say, the bar, who 
has struggled through poverty and hardness 
under that inspiration, an avowed enemy of the 
Gospel ; let him with the well-earned honors of 
scholarship, and the rainbows of great expecta- 



40 Reason a7id Faith 

tion ahead, let him now turn from it all and give 
himself to a lowly ministry in Jesus' name. Has 
he done it without the most thorough conviction 
of his reason as to the substantial verities of the 
humble vocation to which he responds ? To ask 
is to answer such a question ! 

Augustine and lyUther and Calvin and Wesley 
and Edwards and Mark Hopkins, Bushnell and 
Park and Storrs and John Hall ; the Alexanders 
and Hodges and McCosh, Dawson and Dana and 
Henry ; Daniel Webster and Gladstone and Bis- 
marck, — all the hosts who have been and are 
staking their present and eternal all on the 
Faith, — are they doing it without ground of 
reason ? Intellectual giants, some of them heroes 
of moral victory, not fools any of them, honest to 
the very core of their grand natures and princes 
in the realm of reason, it is stupidity to charge 
such men with a faith that is blind and unreason- 
ing. Earth's greatest have deliberately, after 
struggle and hard battle of reasons, given them- 
selves to faith, in the full exercise of all their 
noblest faculties. We know it by their testimo- 
nies, by their lives and by the monuments of 
Christian literature, science, art, poetry, philoso- 
phy and theology which they have builded or are 
yet rearing with unabated ardor and splendor of 
genius. Friends, it is ludicrous for the pigmies 
to stand down there charging these giants, from 
Paul to Edwards, these hosts of earth's intellect- 
ual princes and potentates with an unreasoning 
faith. Reason against reason, brain against brain, 



Reason and Faith 41 

faith has no terror of relative measure or weight 
with modern agnosticism or infidelity. Let your 
flippant champion of modern agnosticism put him- 
self in the brain scales against John Calvin, Bishop 
Butler, Jonathan Edwards or Daniel Webster ! 
For struggle, cost, sacrifice, in embracing and 
maintaining their faith and in forwarding it 
through the earth, let champions of something 
else in this w^orld stand out for comparison in 
stalwart and rational honesty. Let them show 
the work the}^ have done for institutions of learn- 
ing and philanthropy, for the intellectual develop- 
ment of the race, beside that which the devout 
believers have been and still are doing in these 
lines ! "By their works 3^e shall know them." 

We, of the Christ's part, in this w^orld, believe 
by grace of what seem to us most large and ample 
reasons, after fullest exercise of all our rational 
forces. The free-thinkers are, by vast odds, its 
Christians, not its atheists or agnostics. Outcry 
against dogma ? What, then, is dogma ? 
" Dogma " is what seems true. Faiths, dogmas, 
must govern every man — do absolutely and must 
forever control every free and rational act of life. 
Some dogma is the spring of every voluntary 
movement. Until a man believes something he 
remains inactive, — can onh^ act, rationally, on the 
motive of some faith. The dogma that this or 
that will make money governs every man's busi- 
ness ; that this or that will give pleasure rules the 
pleasure seekers ; that this or that will lead to 
power commands the ambitious. The philan- 



42 Reason and Faith 

thropist or reformer holds the dogma that such 
a course will help man, and so acts. Every 
man has his dogma — his creed — and lives by it. 
The dogma that beef gives strength puts it on the 
breakfast table ; that exercise is hygienic wisdom, 
sets men astir ; that home is blessedness, builds 
it ; that fire warms, sets hearths ablaze, and so on 
everywhere. 

Man, uncertain about a thing, in the condition 
of agnosticism, sits still — acts only when he be- 
lieves. No agnostic speaks or acts till he becomes 
a positive believer in his agnostic dogma. Other- 
wise he is a hypocritical impostor. Faith only is 
the actor, does all, literally all, that is done, and 
into these working faiths of all sorts goes the best 
reason of every sane human being. Into the 
faith that shall get him dollars or pleasure or re- 
pute goes so much of studious reason as the case 
calls for, a moment to this, an hour to that more 
serious thing, a week or month or year of deep 
enquiry to that, as the magnitude of the interest 
or the intricacy of the elements of the problem 
may require. Into the settlement of those august 
faiths on which eternities depend, character, des- 
tinies through immortal careers — into that work 
do go, as ought to go, the deepest and most thor- 
ough labors of which human reason is capable. 
He blasphemes man who denies that. All save 
the mad, the reckless, the trifling, have done, are 
doing, and ever will do that. You, out of Christ, 
failing to do that, are missing the finest exercise 
of your intellectual faculties, living frivolously, 



Reason and Faith 43 

in an awful presumption unworthy of any reason- 
able immortal. It is fair to speak of such as 
' ' thoughtless ' ' sinners, because they flee thought 
on the themes most serious and imminent, on 
which it is their highest moral obligation to think 
and act. To let these things of religion go by de- 
fault, unconsidered, or with a mere casual atten- 
tion, is not frivolity alone, it is guilt towards not 
God only, but towards man as well. God has 
constructed you and your fellows for these prob- 
lems and bidden you and them, on your and 
their loyalty and eternal felicity, to consider and 
frame life upon them. Neither you nor I have 
any right to shove them aside for a day ! 

Now, for ground work of believing in these 
matters, whither does reason turn ? 

I. We rationally consider the fact of the prac- 
tically universal and so intuitive apprehension 
of some God. Our own consciousness and the 
testimonies of mankind settle it that there is such 
a practically universal apprehension. Reason 
concludes that such an aptitude, such an intuition, 
of the soul of man can not be illusive. Lungs 
presuppose air ; fins, water ; feet, solid ground for 
standing ; eyes, light!; ears, sound ; knowing fac- 
ulties, objects of knowledge ; affections, objects of 
affection ; moral faculties, a real distinction be- 
tween right and wrong ; instincts of worship, an 
object of worship ; apprehension of God, God ! 
So, by valid yrocess of scientific reason our race- 



44 Reason and Faith 

intuitions of God argue the fact of God. At the 
very least, this universal intuition must remove 
all antecedent improbabilities of His existence. 

II. Thinking on. Effect presupposes cause ; 
contrivances, a contriver ; design, a designer ; 
adaptation of means to ends, an adapter. A 
world is here full of effects, contrivances, adapta- 
tions endless in variety, wonderful in ingenuity, 
on scales of infinite minuteness and astounding 
vastness, of such sort as to evidence wisdom, 
power, and goodness past any limits we can set. 
These facts set reason to its task. Science pushes 
back so far as it can go and finds there a ' ' force ' ' 
universal and always acting behind every phenom- 
enon of the universe. Back of the Moneron 
is the source of its enduement with the potenti- 
alities of life. Reason takes these things, puts 
them together and says, ''intelligence, will, a 
power supreme, goodness unspeakable are mani- 
fest in all the works of this great cause. A per- 
son, — therefore He, — practically infinite, since at 
least beyond our power to set, or to conceive. His 
limitations. As He works through all the realms 
of the one system of the visible universe, through 
all historic spaces and before all organized 
matter, then practically infinite and eternal is 
He. This faith of the one infinite, eternal, per- 
sonal God is the only rational, working hypoth- 
esis of the universe. So, of best reason, theism, 
monotheism, is the faith of all the civilized world, 
save a mere handful of materialists, who have not, 



Reason and Faith 45 

even in science, a single great name* to back 
their credulity, — their incredible dogma of denial 
of God, — their dogma about which they are more 
truculent and intolerant than any Christian believ- 
er is about any doctrine of the Christian faith ! 

III. Then Reason says, "All these human in- 
telligences are equipped with moral sense. A 
universal tendency exists to range all voluntary 
action in one of the two categories, as right or 
wrong. This impulse is found to serve a wide 
and noble range of practical purposes in life, set 
even to command all life. The Creator, then, 
must have planted that impulse in view of some 
real and eternal discrimination between things 
good and evil. We conclude, then, rationally, 
that the moral quality of righteousness must be 
regnant in Him who framed a universe in which 
the moral discrimination is supreme. 

IV. Thinking on, still freely, we find the 
consciousness of wrong done to bring a certain 
trembling for consequences through all souls, an 
apprehension of retributive results for evil. We 
find that everywhere, in all grades of intelligence 
— or lack of it — and in all ages. Some law, then, 
graven by the creative Law-giver, upon the uni- 
versal soul is discovered. This apprehension 
looks on to the end of life, the moment of dying, 
with a strange and universal anxiet}^, with the 

* There are agnostics enough, but atheists, — who are they ? 



46 Reason and Faith 

instinct of an afterwards — of an immortality and 
awards beyond the graves. This tremulousness 
of conscious guilt runs through all and to all sorts 
of penance, in agony and costly gift, in sacrifice 
with blood, and is yet unsatisfied. All this argues 
immortality and retributive futures. 

V. Reason surveys this all, wonders if a good 
God will leave his creatures in such fears, so great 
travail, so deep a darkness, to die in it without 
letting in upon them some light, and concludes 
that He will, somewhere and somehow, bring to 
man the light and power to meet his need and 
relieve his anxious agonies. 

VI. Looking, thinking, freely j^et, lo ! we find 
what claims to be express revelation from God of 
Himself, and of man's relations to Him — of his 
duties, sins and great salvations — a written Word, 
containing just such a figure of God, in all natu- 
ral and moral qualities, as the creation has led 
reason to forecast ; a law precisely such as from 
the conscience and of consciousness we ought to 
expect ; a law of absolute righteousness ; contain- 
ing a record of man's origin and history on the 
earth, such as, from its known constitution and 
historic conditions, it ought to be ; giving account 
of the origin of the visible universe in strange 
accord with all that is scientifically believed about 
it to-day ; announcing immortality for the soul in 
accord with the conclusion of uninspired reason ; 
dealing with the problems of sin and penalty 



Reason and Faith 47 

and possible redemption in the very way which 
we ought to expect from the study of the soul 
itself and of God, and ofiFering to man the fruition 
of his highest hopes both for character and felicity 
and showing him how he may escape both sin 
and its evil consequences. Now, given a rational 
basis, such as we have found already, for any no- 
tion of God, as a Person, a moral Being, good and 
responsible for a moral universe, I affirm that it 
is supremely rational to expect such a revelation 
of Himself and His will and the modes of His 
government, with its rewards and penalties. Such 
a revelation, by the highest exercise of reason, 
ought to be anticipated. Lo, here it is ! The 
only one which the civilized world feels at all to 
answer the rational requirements. Every pre- 
sumption of reason is in its favor. 

VII. Reason, then, goes to weigh its specific 
evidences. Is it a genuine thing from God ? Of 
course I can go into no detail of so vast a matter 
here, nor need I, since I am but repelling the 
charge that our faith is blind and unreasoning. 
These laborious studies of evidence have occupied 
the labors of multitudes of earth's greatest, and 
their published w^orks crowd the libraries of the 
whole world. I only refer to the simplest proof. 
On the first page of the Book is an account of the 
creative ages, their order and process. The ac- 
count w^as held absurd, as a literal record, until 
the riper science of the last half century discovered 
with wonder and with awe that it is a more accu- 



48 Reason and Faith 

rate and literal epitome * of what really was the 
creative process and order than can this day be 
given, in an equal number of words, by any mortal 
in any language now used by the human race. 
Who gave that hidden knowledge of what God 
did when none but God was ? Who gave it to the 
darkness of thirty centuries ago, to be ridiculed, 
the scoffer's joy, till rediscovered during our own 
day ? We may stand there on the first paragraphs 
of the Bible and challenge mankind to account for 
that, and be content to let the battle of reason be 
fought out on that alone. But reason finds, on 
every page of the Book, the God who is what, from 
Nature, He ought to be, but who never was nor 
could have been conceived by man else than by 
this revelation of Him ; a God transcendently at 
odds with all the gods men have invented. It 
finds there records of the history of man which 
could not have been manufactured and put on him 
as true without having been his actual experience, 
and which, if true, are at every point the work of 
Divine interposition ; records which account for 
man as we find him in all historic ages ; records 
strangely verified by all modern research amidst 
the buried monuments of long-extinct civiliza- 
tions. It finds there figures of men who never 
could have been conceived unless they had lived 
and whose lives are continually and visibly 
handled of God. It finds there miracle, as it 

* It matters not to this statement that specialists claim a certain 
amount of overlapping of one stage of creative process upon another. 
The order, as a whole, is correct. 



Reason and Faith 49 

ought to and must, if God would verify his rev- 
elation of Himself to reason, in those or any ages, 
or manifest himself for righteousness in men. It 
finds there unmistakable and voluminous and 
minutely detailed prophecy of remote and improb- 
able futures, which history has most lucidly and 
loyally fulfilled. 

It finds there, as fulfillment of prophecy, as 
culmination of all ritual observance and aim of 
foregoing history, a sublime Figure, — a man, — 
outcome neither of any Jewish nor Gentile civil- 
ization or ideal, opposite to all, yet summarizing 
all. He was as much a Jew as Saul of Tarsus, as 
much a Roman as a Jew, as much a modern as 
an ancient, as good a Chinaman as Confucius, 
as good an Englishman as Gladstone, as fine an 
American as any man who walks the streets of 
Washington to-day. His story is as compelling 
in one language as another and his discourses and 
precepts and parables are as effective in one con- 
tinent and one civilization as in any other. This 
Figure is of the Universal Man, — the Ideal, the 
Spotless, the Perfect Man ; the only good man 
without confession and repentance of sin in all 
history. He brought in a new scheme of truth, 
yet but the old interpreted; a new scheme of 
salvation, yet but the old consummated. He es- 
tablished a wholly unexpected and inconceivable 
style of kingdom, which is yet but the old king- 
dom with a new spirit. He set forth a wholly 
unique standard of character, which was yet but 
the fulness of the ancient type. He showed a 



50 Reason a?id Faith 

new face of God which yet had been ever shin- 
ing through the veil of the old dispensation. 
This Man overthrew all the ideals of His own 
or of any older time, and all the ancient inter- 
pretations of Him who was to come, yet most 
literally and radiantly fulfilled them all. He 
cast down all former ideals of salvation, yet 
brought in the fulness of all the salvations that 
had been foretold. That Figure — the majestic, 
beautiful, and sinless Christ, who must have come 
from God, since no man was ever like Him. Who 
must have lived, since no man of His or any time, 
much less the four simple, untaught fishermen 
who portrayed Him, could have invented Him. 
That Figure is, after all, the Miracle of the Book. 

'^ If Jesus Christ is a man, — 
And only a Man, — I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 

^' If Jesus is a God, — 
And the only God, — I swear 
I will follow Him through heaven and hell, — 
The earth, the sea and the air." 

So a modern poet sings. 

Wendell Phillips declares, ' ' Christ is marvelous, 
wonderful ! He was himself a miracle. The 
miracles he wrought are nothing to the miracle 
he was, if at such an era and in such a condition 
of the world he invented Christianity. I can not 
be so credulous as to believe that any man in- 
vented Christianity." 



Reason and Faith 51 

Here is the Book, written by forty men in dis- 
tant ages, men of varied cultures or of none, in 
many stations, with many different immediate 
aims, in all varieties of literary style, yet one 
Book, all its parts converging to one end, and 
that an end undreamed of by any of its writers, 
each part harmoniously forwarding the great 
whole ; a book born in dark times, yet supreme 
and commanding through ages of earth's best 
light, commanding more and more in these latest 
times. Its records scholarship finds genuine, what- 
ever the age in which they were produced. Par- 
allel records of secular history but confirm them. 
Buried monuments of antiquity rise from their 
sleep of ages to buttress the Word. No attack 
upon its genuineness or its general historic cor- 
rectness has yet been successful, though a world 
of sagacious and pugnacious learning and 
ignorance has been brought to bear upon it. 
Champions of Christian faith eagerly covet thor- 
ough investigation, and every investigation makes 
dearer and more impregnable their fortress. 
False interpretations are getting blown into the 
air; unwarranted dates and names are being 
eliminated, perhaps. But this is only the destruc- 
tion of the human masonries and the reduction of 
the fortress to its original impregnable sufficiency 
as the infallible guide of religious faith and prac- 
tice. In that reduction all stout defenders rejoice. 
When all the mere human masonries are swept 
away there will be left all that is precious to the 
soul and nothing which the artilleries of modern 



52 Reason and Faith 

critical warfare can in the least affect. Using 
then, and freely, profoundest reason on all these 
things, every demand is met, and we conclude, 
''This is, indeed, a very revelation of God and 
His will for man." 

VIII. But this is not all. We call men to the 
proof of actual experiment. The Gospel and its 
Book propose to handle precisely the things we 
ought to expect, — God, Man, Sin, Righteousness, 
Immortalities, Redemption. Whence came I ? 
Whither go? How be clear of my trembling 
consciousness of guilt? How escape the perdi- 
tions of my sin ? How come to holiness and 
bliss ? These are the vital questions which must 
have answer before the bar of reason. Exact and 
most reasonable answer comes from this source, 
and from this alone, from no other under the whole 
heaven. Here we have a doctrine of God, of man, 
of immortality , of sin, and of redemption from it. 
In Christ the promise is of pardon for all the past 
on the most rational condition of a true and real 
repentance which breaks the guilty identity of 
the old-time sinner. In Him we are to find, on 
purely rational terms, the renewal of the sur- 
rendered soul — its re-creation into righteousness 
and true holiness. The whole nature is now 
dominated by holiness and the love of it, by love 
of God in the wonderful Christ, and for all fellow 
men, and the entire being is given up to the 
mighty handling and guidance of the Holy Spirit. 
These are exactly the things which reason would 



Reason and Faith 53 

forecast as necessary to perfect man, justify the 
universe and glorify its Creator. Proof? Well, 
then, it has been tried. Tried for centuries. 
Wherever tried, under whatever conditions, the 
nations have leaped into new life, have come up 
into liberty and grandeur and command in the 
world's affairs. The races which have tested its 
redemption are those which to-day wear the crown 
of the world's hope and kingship of its future. 
Christendom is Civilization ! Consider individ- 
ual lives. Souls by the myriad have, as matter 
of scientific fact, laid aside their old sins, found 
conscious pardon, rest, peace, holiness — found in 
Christ all that is promised ; have gone through 
long lives in this world's eye-sight, exulting in 
every sweet grace and heavenly beauty of char- 
acter and behavior ; have grown marvelouslj^ like 
their Lord and died at the last in triumph, visibly 
fitted for the felicities of the Christian's Heaven. 
Millions have taken the straight, short cut to 
demonstration of the Gospel's verity by trying it. 
A proof which I affirm to be supremely satisfac- 
tory to any sane reason and which no processes of 
mere argumentation can undermine. To satis- 
faction of candid reason you can come on the 
basis of mere argument. To verification of the 
abstract reasoning you can come by trying the 
experiment of Christ's grace for yourself. Reas- 
ons are good, commanding, irrefragable. But 
reasons are good for nothing unless you act on 
them. Believe, not about the Lord Jesus Christ, 
but believe on Him. We offer you the firmest 



54 Reason and Faith 

ground of reason inexpugnable and then propose 
the instant demonstration of personal experiment. 
We rest the case with this two-fold challenge. 
Try it ! Consciousness shall justify reason and 
our faith shall stand in the triumphant certainty 
of personal experience, against which all the 
powers of earth and hell can not prevail, before 
which the gates of heaven shall swing open for 
eternal joy ! Be that your wisdom and your fe- 
licity ! Yours and mine ! 



Reason and Faith 55 



CHAPTER IV 

THK MIRACIvK RKASONABI^K 

Go and show John again those things which ye do hear 
and jf^.— Jesus the Christ. 

As WK have already seen, the existence of evil 
in the world, with its observed results and its 
revealed consequences, has been the most prolific 
source of skepticism concerning the existence of a 
personal and good God. This doubt of the exist- 
ence of such a God is the root of disbelief in 
miracle. The delighted scorn with which the dis- 
believers alight on the proposition of a miracle as 
*' superstition," *' absurdity , " ''impossibility," as 
' ' incredible on any testimony, " is a thing wonder- 
ful to observe. Believers in these "fables " and 
''fairy tales " are " ignorant," "credulous " and 
wholly destitute of the critical literary or historic 
sense, or any sense at all ! Any tolerable degree 
of culture will, necessarily, obliterate all traces of 
such a faith, they cry. It is difficult to over- 
state the unmeasured contempt, mounting into 
wrath, which they visit on us belated and be- 
nighted believers in the " Wonder Book." Well 
they may cry out so, for granted a miracle, even 
one little one, then God ! Then is the Gospel true ! 

Every creed, of believer or disbeliever — for 
each is alike the holder and the slave of a creed — 



56 Reason and Faith 

every creed is a system of beliefs logically inter- 
locked and springing naturally and necessarily 
from some root-proposition which commands it. 
The more logical, that is, the more capable of 
consistent and consecutive thought and the more 
in the habit of it the man is, the more certain he 
will be to seek till he find consistency in all his 
believings. Now the logical root of faith in 
miracle is God — a person free, active, concerned 
for the happiness, righteousness and highest weal 
of His creatures. The logical basis of denial of 
miracle is denial of any such God. 

What, then, is this thing — Miracle ? Exactly 
enough for our present purpose, it is this — God 
has, on occasion, so interfered with the ordinary 
processes of Nature as to demonstrate His own 
active personal presence and will in the affairs 
of men. The intervention proves to the observer 
an agency superhuman. Divine. He stands in 
awe and says, ''God " ! and is so made ready to 
hear and obey. Supernatural ? Not necessarily 
so. It may be a handling of Nature in a way 
perfectly open to a power and wisdom finer than 
man's. We can not say that it is even a contra- 
vention of Nature's ordinary laws, but the ob- 
server is sure that it is such a handling of them 
as manifests to him the Deity. Devil's miracles 
are not incredible, given a credible Devil. On 
the basis of a credible infernal kingdom, modern 
Spiritualistic performance may have infer-human 
and genuine manifestations amidst its mass of 
bald imposture. 



Reason and Faith 57 

Taking now, as true, the fundamental propo- 
sition of all religious faith, "There is a God, a 
personal God, freely active in the universe He 
has created, " it is not impossible that He should 
manifest Himself in it by special and extraordinary 
touches of power at any moment and for any pur- 
pose whatever. I myself can, you can, anybody 
can, by the incoming of his personal agency, 
modify, handle, manifest himself, by interferences 
with the established order of things, in a thousand 
ways. We do it constantly. Indeed that is the 
only means we have of manifesting ourselves at 
all to each other. Each of our bodies reflects, 
partially absorbs or refracts from their right lines 
the rays of light, so as to be thus and thus visible 
to others. Each of us at will stirs such vibra- 
tions of the all-surrounding ether as to make him- 
self audible. Each of us is, at every moment of 
voluntary action, producing phenomena in Nature 
which, but for these personal agencies, could not 
have existed, and which demonstrate this per- 
sonal existence. We ourselves are above mere 
physical nature, not super-natural, but super- 
material, and forever impressive upon the ma- 
terial world. What absurdity, then, to imagine 
that the personal, free, all-wise, and almighty 
God who made the whole scheme of Nature is 
incapable — the only Incapable of the universe! 
It is not impossible that God, if there be one, 
should manifest Himself in His own universe by 
phenomena in the physical world which He alone 
can produce. That is as an axiom of theism. If 



58 Reasofi and Faith 

it be not impossible to Him it is not, necessarily, 
incredible to us. If there be no such God, then 
miracle is neither credible nor possible. 

But, granted that miracle is possible to a free and 
active God, who does exist, is it not yet so im- 
probable that we can not believe in its occurrence 
on any testimony ? Suppose, now, that this per- 
sonal, free God stands in relations of affectionate 
concern in — even of responsibility for — the weal 
of the sentient creation He has made. Suppose 
that He loves, not only, but loves to be loved — 
that He has a Father's heart, and here is the 
race of His children, who are vastly ignorant 
of Him and their relations to Him. He wants 
their love, their gratitude, their worship. It be- 
comes vastly probable that He will, if He can, 
reveal Himself to them. Suppose that they need, 
for their owm development in power, in intelli- 
gence, in character, in the finest elements of love, 
gratitude and loyalty, and so in blessedness — sup- 
pose, I say, that they need for all these the clear 
knowledge of an affectionate Heavenly Father, 
near by and concerned, instantly, on their behalf, 
is it not hugely likely, then, that He will take the 
measures needful to so impress upon them His 
presence, care, and love ? 

Suppose now, further, that having made them 
in the highest type of created finite being, in His 
own image, free and moral creatures, the}^, using 
their unquestionable prerogative of liberty, have 
gone into evil, wrought on themselves curses be- 
yond number or measure — ruinous, as, indisput- 



Reason a7id Faith 59 

ably, they have done. Suppose that, by their free 
and wanton sins, these topmost creatures of His 
world have blinded themselves to spiritual vision, 
destroyed their spiritual sensibilities, approached 
suicide on the higher faculties, and gone down to 
live in the basements of their natures like scullions 
in the kitchens. Suppose that they have gone 
unconscious of the vast realms of being, reality 
and activity beyond the material, visible and 
tangible, as is demonstrated by the actual va- 
garies of materialism and atheism, which claim to 
know naught of either God or soul or any be3^ond 
or above ; and as is demonstrated with equal force 
by multitudes who have not gone mad in theoretic 
infidelity, but only live in practical forgetfulness 
of all but flesh and sense — suppose all this, and 
that God has not given them over to the remediless 
results of their suicidal work, but still loves and 
cares and determines on restoration of the spirit- 
ual life, on the uplift of fallen man to a higher 
and grander estate than that from which he had 
cast himself down, — What then ? 

All this of man's ruin and misery is not merely 
revealed fact, but fact of history, of observation 
and oi experie7ice. This, being so, a Divine pur- 
pose to recover and restore ought to be, if God be 
and be the God we take Him for ! Had man re- 
mained in his holy or innocent estate, alive to 
spiritual vision, sensitive to spiritual approach 
and access, all spiritual processes for his develop- 
ment might have been of mere nature, on the 
range of his unmarred natural powers. There 



6o Reason and Faith 

might have been no need of anything super- 
human, all might have been level to the appre- 
hension of every man. Now the whole problem 
is altered. Man has alienated himself from God ; 
or, if you choose to say that, has never risen to 
range of the spiritual at all ; is, at any rate, in 
total misapprehension or forgetfulness of Him ; 
has set up sticks and stones and hideous things — 
beasts, birds, reptiles — for gods, and worships 
them with lust, debauch, and even murder. He so 
has lost what else had been his natural power to 
recognize God, the One, the Living and the True. 
There has followed the whole train of earth's 
horrors for the time that now is and for the 
eternity that is to be. 

What, now, is left a free, personal God who 
loves and would redeem to the splendors of moral 
and spiritual power and the beauty of Holiness 
such a race ? He can intervene to demonstrate 
Himself in ways of miracle and wonder. There 
is nothing in that impossible to Him and so in- 
credible to us, if there be due occasion for it. The 
occasion is here, grand, awful and imperious as 
the redemption of this multitudinous race of 
ours, — the crown of His visible creation, — from 
intolerable curse and shame into peers for the 
kingdoms and courts of eternal glory. Is it not 
likely that He will bestir Himself, make Himself 
known, as the one God, the only and living God, 
almighty and all-wise — the Father, Lover, Sav- 
iour of such a race, out of such miseries, into such 
splendors ? Surely He will if He can ! Surely 



Reason and Faith 6i 

He can if He will ! So infinitely likely will He 
be, being the God He is, to do it, that it seems to 
me the one thing any sane reason must expect 
with what amounts to practical certainty. Nor 
are we Christians alone in this expectation. The 
human race has ever refused to credit any revela- 
tion as from the gods or any system of relations 
with them, or of service required which has not 
authentication by supposed miracle. The univer- 
sal expectation of man everywhere is that any real 
God will manifest Himself by the works, the 
tokens of Godhood. The antithesis of miracle is 
''no God," or a mere-force God, manifest only in 
play of changeless and inexorable law, and so 
never to become demonstrable to reason as any- 
thing but blind force. A doctrine this which can 
never satisfy the heart or kindle the mighty pas- 
sions of Redemption ! 

Here stands the case, then. A race made in His 
own Image, or at any rate, capable of loftiest de- 
velopment into it, the very aim and crown of the 
visible creation, beloved of God and designed for 
His eternal fellowship, but gone in sin out even 
of knowledge of Him, sunken into intolerable 
misery and hopeless of betterment under ordinary 
play of natural law ; that hopelessness proven by 
ages of sinking from bad to worse, in all history : 
and here a God, free, personal and affectionate, 
able to redeem and save sublimely ; able to get at 
them by extraordinary action amidst the phenom- 
ena of Nature ; able to get at them in no other 
way without still more extraordinary^ and super- 



62 Reason arid Faith 

natural means ; able, so, to bring them into play 
of the loftiest motives, powers and passions which 
can inspire the human will. In such case, will he 
do it ? Aye, if He be indeed such a God as we 
take Him for. He will. He must, for He is in- 
finite compassion and power. 

It is useless to cavil, saying, " Why did He let 
them fall into so sad a case, then ? ' ' It is clear 
that He did do that — and we have seen that that 
permission was a necessity in a moral universe. 
It is worse than useless to urge that this notion of 
a creation in innocence, a fall and a redemption by 
miraculous intervention is a scheme of after- 
thought, of awkward mistake and bungling rem- 
edy, for it has been shown in a former discourse, 
that it is the way of the development of the sub- 
limest conceivable type of finite character. There 
is about it no blunder, after-thought or awkward- 
ness, but divinest stroke of splendid art and power 
for erection of beings God-like, on Thrones beside 
His own. God did not make things and get them 
wrong and then have to step in and set them to 
rights. He created moral beings in a moral uni- 
verse, free, therefore, to sin and fall — a being who 
would forever need the inspiration and helpful 
power of a God present to his consciousness. It 
was of the eternal plan that such a creature, so 
needing Him, should have Him in authentic and 
realized handling of His life and the world. The 
plan of intervention by Divine sign is the original, 
aboriginal plan for the development of the race, 
through gratitude, love, great fight for righteous- 



Reason aiid Faith 63 

ness, up into fitness for Peerage of the Heavens. 
Sin and Redemption are not afterthoughts ; and 
miracle, by which God breaks through the fixed 
order of Nature to reach the heart of man with His 
boundless Grace, is no bungle, but the Master- 
piece of Redeeming Art ! 

How get men to know God? By stroke of 
miracle only has He demonstrated Himself. See, 
as matter of fact, how well He is known to those 
who refuse to accept miracle and superhuman 
modes of revelation ! Not one of them pretends 
to know anything about Him, not even so much 
as to affirm whether He be at all. Agnosticism, 
denial of any possible knowledge about Him or 
His existence is the best they can do without the 
miracle, even in the light of this last year of the 
nineteenth century ! How much better could they 
fairly suppose the old Israel of Egypt or the Jew 
of the Judges, the Kings, the Christ's times, to 
have gotten on in Divine science without Divine 
authentication of the Divine facts, than they them- 
selves can now ? How would the Jew have gotten 
out of Egypt or how would the world have gotten 
on without the redemptive energies developed 
through these miraculous interpositions? But 
by stroke of miracle He convinced Moses of 
Himself and authenticated His commission to 
face and face down the proudest empire of the 
world. The bush that burned, unconsumed ; the 
voice, the rod, — a serpent, an Egyptian god and 
then a rod again, — the leprous hand clean again, 
these made Moses — Moses ! By stroke of miracle 



64 Reason and Faith 

after miracle He convinced Israel and Egypt of 
His very and only God-head. By perpetual re- 
currence of miracle He established His govern- 
ment over His people and taught the world Him- 
self, His attributes and His claims. By miracle 
He authenticated His revelations and His mes- 
sengers, when there seems to have been no other 
way in which He could have done it. By crown- 
ing miracle of grace in Jesus, the Christ, his in- 
carnation, his life, his death, his resurrection, He 
showed so His Father-heart to man that we are 
melted, broken, repentant, lifted into raptures of 
love and joy and worship, are set out into lives of 
holy service and careers of grandeur. Let them 
tell me of a Christ, the Christ, in whose birth there 
was no miracle, in whose life there was neither 
superhuman deed nor claim to superhuman power, 
I answer, ' ' There has been none such ! ' ' There 
is not a jot of proof of any such. The only 
story that purports to give us a Christ at all 
is that on whose sacred pages blazes miracle 
wrought and claim to superhuman origin and 
power and authority over all the realms of life 
and duty and sin and destiny. They demand 
a feat of supreme credulity and unreason, namely, 
that I shall suppose these Evangelists to give us 
a true and reliable picture of the Christ, on whom 
I can depend, as a historic person of such and 
such quality, as speaking such and such words, 
addresses, parables ; they were truthful and 
worthy of credence, so that we have got a verit- 
able Christ, — Saviour of the world, leader and 



Reaso7i and Faith 65 

topmost of mankind, through their testimony, — 
yet I must reject their story of His birth, its ante- 
cedents and circumstances, must deny their every 
account of his openly-wrought miracles, to which 
he himself pointed as such ; must cast out their 
every quotation of His claims to Divine power and 
knowledge ; must afl&rm them to have deliberately 
testified, as eye-witnesses, in the very province 
and generation of those who were eye-witnesses 
with them, and who, in their hostility, were but 
too eager to convict them of falsehood, to innum- 
erable lies, drawn out in elaborate detail, circu- 
lated while He was yet alive, unrebuked of Him, 
scattered broadcast soon after His death ; then, 
further, to believe that these same men gave the 
labors of all their lives, faced all perils, took all 
damage and endured the expected horrors of 
martyr deaths in a more than madman's frenzy 
for their tissues of fable and falsehood. They 
ask too much for my credulity ! Why, they even 
ask that out of such a jargon of lie and folly I 
shall get a Christ for world's perpetual homage 
and secure salvation. This is the most astound- 
ing stretch of credulity yet demanded in the his- 
tory of mankind. The denial of the superhuman 
in the Christ, from the Incarnation to the Resur- 
rection, and all the marvel that came between, is 
to fling the whole story of the Evangelists into 
the waste-basket of classical — of less than classi- 
cal^ — myths. If these men were mistaken, or 
worse, about his miraculous birth, then was He 
* * born in sin ' ' indeed ! If thev told men that He 



66 Reason afid Faith 

turned water into wine, He should have corrected 
their mistake. Did they claim that He opened 
the eyes of the blind at Jericho, then He did it or 
connived at their falsehood, and all Jericho must 
have been in the secret ! Did they falsel}^ claim 
that He raised up Lazarus from the three days' 
dead ? Why, all Jerusalem was stirred by the 
fact, and Jesus must have known the claim. Were 
these things and the words of Jesus claiming to 
be one with the Father and the like claims to 
Divine power scattered through all the Testament, 
foisted into the story afterwards? What basis 
have we, then, for confidence in what remains ? 

Do you say that the Christ must have lived, 
since no such conception of character and life 
could have been formed except on a living model ? 
Aye, verily ! But the exact things which make 
such a personage inconceivable without the living 
model are the things which have to do with the 
superhuman side of Him. It would not have 
been impossible for the man who told the story of 
Lazarus to conceive and write out the merely 
human side of Jesus. The difiiculty is in con- 
ceiving, without the model, the Divine in the 
Human, — the Human in the Divine. The diflS- 
culty in creating a fictitious Jesus is in exactly 
these points where the disbeliever claims that all 
is fiction ! 

That these simple-minded, simple-hearted, brave 
and loyal fisherfolk of the Gospels could have 
constructed of their own genius the picture of the 
Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, is incredible. 



Reason and Faith 67 

That they could have taken some great man and 
put on him these fables of wonder and miracle 
and gotten them believed, among a hostile people 
of his own country and generation, is more in- 
credible. That such men as these, who lived in 
the faith of the Divine One whom they had known 
so intimately and portrayed so simply, gave their 
pain-filled lives to the propagation of a false story 
and then died for fables of their own construction 
is too much to ask of credulit}^ itself. That out 
of such a conglomerate of duplicit}^ and stupidity 
as the Gospels are on the anti-miracle theor>% 
any critical or historic sense can get a real and 
historic Christ and a real, authentic Christian 
doctrine, is too much for sanity. That out of 
such a conglomerate could have come the magnifi- 
cent resultant, — the Christian world of to-day and 
the exultant expectation of the more glorious to- 
morrow, — would be greater miracle than any 
which stumbles faith in all the records of the 
Evangelists ! It is easier for reason to accept the 
Divine-Human Christ of the Gospels, with all his 
*' Wonderful Works," than to account for that 
august Figure and Life in any other way. 

The believer's position, therefore, is this : A 
personal, free and active God, affectionately con- 
cerned in and responsible for man, can, and will 
be infinitely likely to, interfere in superhuman 
sort for the rescue of the beloved race, when it 
has fallen into misery and peril. There is nothing 
incredible or even unlikely about it. It is to be 
expected, when the circumstances demand it. 



68 Reason a?id Faith 

The circumstances have demanded it. The evi- 
dences of miracle are to be weighed and sifted 
like the evidences of any other event, but with a 
very tremendous presumption in favor of and not 
against it, when due occasion has arisen for it. 
Doubt of miracle springs from, or will resolve it- 
self into, doubt of God, Inexorable logic lands 
us there. Our God, if He be, and be what we 
think Him, will manifest Himself from the realms 
of the spiritual nature, to lift us up and bring us 
back to knowledge of Himself and to estabhsh in 
holiness and felicity all who will be persuaded. 



Reaso7i and Faith 69 

CHAPTER V 

THE JUSTIFICATION OF THK UNJUST 

That He might be just and the Justifier of him that believeth 
in Jesus. — St. Paul. 

This passage is the Great Apostle's statement 
of the most difficult problem of the Gospel. 
Law, sin, condemnation, redemption — God just, 
yet justifying the sinner — these are the elements 
of the supreme paradox. "Plato, Plato,'' said 
Socrates, ' ' it may be that the gods can forgive 
deliberate sin, but how, I can never tell." Justi- 
fication of the unjust ? The naturalist, the mate- 
rialist, the rationalist, with one accord pronounce 
it even unthinkable. The problem is serious, vast 
and difficult — so much so that its consideration 
here leaves no time for prelude. 

The matter of discussion will be seen to turn, 
necessarily, on the relation of repentance to justice 
in the Divine administration. If we can not find 
sound, rational ground of procedure here, we 
shall be tossed in wide seas and in peril. 

At the outset, the ideas of justice and govern- 
ment need be carefully disentangled in thought. 
Justice is not government, but only the regulative 
element in it. It is not even so much as the end 
or final cause in law and government, but only the 



70 Reason afid Faith 

controlling principle in their methods. The ends 
sought in government are quite aside from mere 
justice. Those ends are expediencies, and are as 
manifold as the interests of individual men multi- 
plied by the millions and societies of men. They 
pertain to all questions of physical existence and 
activity, property, inheritance, trade, commerce. 
They touch, with a sort of sweeping omnipotence, 
all the intellectual, moral and spiritual forces and 
interests of men in society. They cover ten thou- 
sand questions of necessity, expediency, taste, 
tradition, culture, conventional rights, which may 
have been originally outside any considerations 
of justice. Justice is merely the regulative prin- 
ciple under which laws should be set up and ad- 
ministrations conducted. Justice is an abstract 
idea. Law and government are very concrete af- 
fairs, set afoot for myriads of practical ends, not 
for the sake of embodying justice, though they 
should be in accord with it. If you use the fig- 
ure of soul and body for illustration of the rela- 
tion between justice and government, it must 
be only to use justice as the law of correspondence 
between a true soul and a normal body. Justice is 
a moral attribute in God or man. Government 
is a definite scheme of laws and administration 
for specific ends in the universe. Justice were yet 
the regulative fact in the soul of God, though 
there were no creation and no government. Jus- 
tice is the same always and everywhere, while 
rightful forms of law and government are as 
varied as the natures and conditions of the gov- 



Reason and Faith 71 

erned and the objects to be reached by legisla- 
tion, — variant even to contradiction, — yet the one 
as rightful as the other. Expedients, then, exist 
in law and government, in endless variety, to suit 
the circumstances, consistent with justice, illus- 
trating it ; but they are not it nor may they be 
confounded with it. They are not so nearly it 
as the government is to being the governor, or the 
governor to being his law, or the creator to being 
the creation, or the principle on which he creates. 
All this may seem too plain to need the saying ; 
but great confusion of thought and language has 
existed here which must be cleared. 

As the law and government of God are not jus- 
tice, though just, so justice as men reckon it is 
another thing than law or government. Our ideas 
of justice must be cleared of the notions which 
arise from the human administrations of it, — a 
difficult thing, too, to get really done. The moral 
quality — justice — is the same in us and in God. 
Here lies His Image in us. Its relations to human 
law and administrations are analogous to those 
it holds in the Divine. But now we have to 
insert, for vital and awful diflFerence, the facts 
of human fallibility and weakness, not to say 
sin, over against the all-wisdom, all-power, and 
all-goodness of God. Justice, in the Divine admin- 
istration and handling of it, will be in vast con- 
trast with the human handling. In the latter the 
business becomes, through no fault of law or leg- 
islator or court, but of necessit}^ a really terrible 
bungle, and not ideal justice at all. It is at best 



72 Reason and Faith 

little else than a shift for personal and public 
safety in continual emergency; is often so crude 
and rude as to be verj^ like outrage on justice. 
It has always to wait on men's conditions and 
external showings and modify itself to his prog- 
ress. It catches a man at his worst and weakest 
and grades him at his meanest possibility. It 
makes no account of his ten thousand loyalties, 
obediences, conformities ; but lays hands on him 
in his cups, in his rage, when he is beside himself 
under passion and temptation too mighty for his 
momentary frailness. It seizes him in the moment 
of his physical disorder or mental depression or 
social captivity or satanic instigation or moral 
atrophy and damns him for a murder or other 
outrage which his whole soul abhors and of 
which, at any average moment of self-possession, 
he could not have been guilty — from which he 
may have sprung back, instantly, in the recoil of a 
very genuine repentance and remorse. His whole 
life-time, it may be, has held but one hour in 
which he could have fallen into this thing. But 
human justice caught him just there and so, away 
down there at the bottom of his deepest fall ! So 
through all the pangs, horror, years of unavailing 
remorse, that brand is there — burned in. That 
act, — that one isolated act, — out of the myriads 
of contrasted acts, which do, each one, equally or 
better index his quality — that one act is made 
to characterize him, blazons him so long as he is 
remembered among men. The man is that, so 
opposite and abhorrent to him ! As matter of 



Reason and Faith 73 

genuine character, he may never have been down 
there at all nor fit to be indexed so. This thing, — 
human justice, — has made one outward perform- 
ance, which may have been wholly sporadic, in 
the deepest sense accidental, the indicator of the 
man — an outward act and not the inward char- 
acter, has graded, settled the place, penalty, fate 
of the man. This may well enough have been 
true outrage on him. Yet it must be admitted 
that this is the best human justice can do ; that 
it is even necessary that it be done ; that the 
doctrine of ' ' eminent domain ' ' must carry here 
as in property rights ; that the individual interest 
and right even, must give way to the general. 
Public weal requires that acts of crime be pun- 
ished. But no man can fail to see that the 
whole business is liable to awful bungle and is 
only a shadow and parody, at best, of that 
august thing — ideal justice. That is not the 
avenging of an act, which may not at all index 
character ; that is not the avenging of an act at 
all, but only the serene adjustment of condition 
to real desert, perfect adjustment of estate to 
character. An act has no conscious moral entity 
that it be punishable, but only the actor, and he 
only on the ground of blame's worth in character, 
and only to the precise measure of that blame- 
worthiness. 

Another sore but unavoidable frailness of human 
justice follows, which is this : It has a memory ! 
It grades this day's and to-morrow's estate by the 
deed of yesterday, while yesterday's character 



74 Reason and Faith 

may have gone down with yesterday's sun, in the 
profound shame of yesterday's sin. A new moral 
attitude may have risen with the new morning's 
light. The very hour of the crime may, well 
enough, have left the man in such a sense and 
shame of it, such horror of himself on account of 
it, as to have created a fair impossibility that he 
should ever be capable of the like again. His 
moral sense may have wakened in the moment of 
the sin ; the night hours may have wrought him 
to an undying revolt against the thing and all its 
class of things. That, however, can not matter 
to the human tribunal. There the act is squarely 
proven. Let fall the thunder ! O, poor blind 
master of the fates of men, no w^onder that in 
universal art the statues of Justice are blind- 
folded ! Human justice has an awful memory, 
but not insight ; while not memory at all, 
but insight wholly, is the thing essential to the 
ideal — the real thing — the absolute equity. 
It must simply observe character; the hour's 
attitude of inward character must be met by 
adjustment of condition to desert in the ideal 
administration. That justice keeps no record. 
Record were to it of no use. Record is only to 
ill-supply lack of insight. 7"Aa/ justice of which 
we speak has vision and no need of record. It 
is directed by immediate perception, not by 
memory. Its dealings will accord with record 
only when possibility of moral change is closed 
up. Ideal justice is not vengeance upon an act 
nor visitation upon a record, but a fitting of 



Reason a7id Faith 75 

present handling to present deserving. Desert of 
yesterday laid on the soul to-morrow is injustice 
unless the soul abide to-morrow in the unchanged 
desert of yesterday. 

I am told that the decisions of few modern 
judges have more weight with jurists than those 
of the late Samuel Lee Selden, of the New York 
Court of Appeals. Asking him once how far 
the administration at the hands of the courts 
coincided with absolute justice, I shall never 
forget the solemnity of his sad reply: "Abso- 
lute justice has little to do with it. Criminal 
and even civil law, and judicial handling under 
them, is mainly a make-shift for public and 
private utility. The estimate of character and 
actual desert is so impossible to any tribunal as 
not to form any large element in it. The most 
careful execution of necessary laws will often 
violate every axiom of absolute justice." This 
was the substance of a to me most memorable and 
impressive conversation with a man of judicial 
genius. 

A yet further element of the imperfection of 
human justice is this : In framing and executing 
laws a large feature is consideration of conse- 
quences. Heavy penalties and long sentences issue 
against the crimes that are rife. Stern work must 
be done against the criminal bias of the time. 
Rigid severities must avert the current tendency. 
Yet that set of current does not aggravate, but 
materially palliates the personal guilt of the act. 
This human justice, that is, is cursed not only 



76 Reason and Faith 

with a memory but with foresight and outlook as 
well ; whereas ideal justice has only insight, only 
sees what is and adjusts all to that. The con- 
sequence of a moral act is only part of it in a me- 
chanical and not a moral sense. With that con- 
sequence the ideal justice has nothing whatever 
to do. It deals only with the disposition, motive, 
purpose behind the act — the character of the 
actor. 

Now over against all these frailnesses of the 
human stands shining and eternal the serene 
figure of the ideal and absolute Justice, with its 
perfect insight of character and desert, with its 
resources equal to the adjustment of all conditions 
to the actual deserving. It does not handle formal 
acts at all, but substantial actors — sets penalties 
not to deeds but to character. It uses no memory 
of yesterday, nor foresight of to-morrow, nor out- 
look, making an instance a sort of safeguard or 
even an expiatory sacrifice for the general thrift. 
It is not a judgment on yesterday's record to be 
executed to-day on a victim whose present moral 
status may meantime have been wholly revolu- 
tionized, whose present moral desert may bear to 
it no relation whatever. Past judgments hold 
over onl)^ so long as past desert, that is, past 
frame of moral character, holds. When that gets 
fixed and changeless, then estate, under absolute 
justice, gets so ; not till then. 

That our God, outside His special scheme of 
mercy in Christ, will handle souls exactly as they 
do and not as they did deserve — by insight, not 



Reason and Faith 77 

by memory, according to present fact and not by 
record, by desert and not by outlook — ought to 
be axioms of faith, intuitions. With outward acts 
and consequences He can manage well enough in 
His universe. He can rule and over-rule amongst 
them to make even all men's wraths to praise Him 
and work the ultimate weal of the whole. He 
needs none of the make-shifts and actual outrage 
which must characterize human law and admin- 
istration in the interest of utility. All that it — 
this sublime equity — is concerned with is the 
absolute adjustment of condition, estate to desert, 
to actual character as it stands before its bar. So 
much for this matter of justice. 

Repentance. What now is repentance ? First 
thing making toward it is recognition of the 
wrong done or of the evil of character from which 
it sprung — an act of moral intelligence, clear and 
commanding, upon the performance or estate to 
judge it. The very start is that, for regeneration 
of a man — fulcrum in for uplift out of the pit. 
A second experience, drawing very near now to 
the thing itself, is shame and sorrow for the 
thing to be repented of. Gloomy but magnifi- 
cent moving of the soul is this, up out of the bad 
airs, away from the miasmatic levels and the evil 
kinships. It is getting out of sympathy with its 
own evil self, into possibility of better things. 
Break of moral identity beginning ! Now comes 
the third, the crucial, the real thing, in re- 
pentance. A whole determination of the will — 
the man — to end, to have done with the evil. 



78 Reason and Faith 

Recognition of sin, shame and sorrow for it, rises 
to fixed determination to be done with it. This 
process has always been under impulse of the 
Holy Spirit, has ever led to surrender of the soul 
to Him who alone can effect a renewal of the 
nature itself into holiness ; and every such sur- 
render issues in the great fact — regeneration, by 
the grace of God ! Now you have a soul taken 
squarely out of the category of the former style 
of sinner — up on a plane of character above its 
yesterdays, only liable to the yesterdays' pen- 
alties on some low, mechanical theory of the 
human, blind, and bungling parody of justice. 
Can the Divine Justice inflict now upon this 
repentant soul — this new man — the penalties 
which a persistent yesterday would have made as 
inevitable as they were just? Let that shame, 
sorrow, determination sweep out to cover, with 
disgust, all the evil of the heart and life. I^et 
the whole free manhood give itself in mighty pur- 
pose against all evil, in that profound repent- 
ance which at once abhors sin and sinfulness, 
and would forever quit them, giving itself to 
holiness and to God ! Have you not now a soul 
wholly removed from the categories of the former 
sin and set in an entirely new attitude before the 
court of absolute equity? Is now any record 
of the past a fair showing of its moral state ? Is 
the vast accumulation of the sins, defaults, de- 
formities of that life, up to date of this repenting, 
an index of what this soul now is and now de- 
serves — of its real present worthiness ? Which is, 



Reason and Faith 79 

I take it, the only question possible to be getting 
itself before the insight of the Divine Judgment. 

Why, if human courts were possessed of that 
perfect insight of the culprit's exact moral frame, 
as he comes under judgment ; if the public mind 
were, in like wise, absolutely cognizant, to know 
how this penitent and remorseful soul is now 
high above the moral plane on which he stood 
when the crime he did was possible to him ; did 
court and people know that these penitent shows 
of contrition and appearances of holiness were 
absolutely genuine and controlling, then the in- 
fliction of the penalty would seem the injustice 
which it is. Possibly the penalty might still have 
to be executed. The culprit might still have to 
admit the necessity of his suffering it as a deter- 
rent to others and safeguard of society ; but the 
discrepancy between actual present character and 
the penalty which only befits a wholly different 
one would shock the world. A holy and loving 
child of God and heir of swift glory, far on 
toward the likeness of Christ, might be seen in 
the agonies of the cross, the shame of the gibbet, 
the tragedy of the electric chair. In the eternal 
ministration of ideal justice, the more appalling 
spectacle of final infliction in the spiritual world 
of penalties which would befit only a character 
which no longer exists will not be set to mar the 
adorations of the universe ! At the long last 
will be perfect accord between character and 
environment. Every soul will be in ''its own 
place.'' Mis-fits will be forever past. 



So Reason and Faith 

Repentance, therefore, with the regeneration 
which evermore attends it, is at once quittance 
and acquittance of sin. It is a whole soul turned 
away eagerly from its past evil, standing in a 
wholly new attitude of character and desert. Its 
new frame is absolutely alien to the act repented 
of, gone out of its realm, ceased from all present 
responsibility for it, in the very highest moral sense 
and before any court of the absolute equities. 
And God is just to justify the penitent ! Could 
He be just in not acquitting him who has truly 
repented all sin ? 

As I have said, if court and world could know 
the innermost frame of the penitent convict and 
be sure of its permanency, all the penalties of just 
law might be remitted, justice would be served by 
it, and the public conscience would demand it, 
not as mere mercy, but as clear justice. The 
difficulty would be in the loss of the deterrent 
force of penalty upon others. Men might rush 
into crime on the assumption that they, too, 
would repent and so escape. It is not for a 
moment to be thought that in the final adjust- 
ment at the barof eternal judgment such pruden- 
tial considerations will be suffered to deflect the 
course of Divine Equity. Here it is a necessary 
make-shift of human ignorance and weakness 
that has no need nor place in the final, universal, 
and wholly righteous awards. 

The Gospel is God's way of effecting in man 
this true repentance, this break of guilty identity, 
by creating anew the soul in righteousness and 



Reason a7id Faith 8i 

true holiness. Old things, — records and all, — 
are swept away. All things become new. The 
guilty identity has vanished ! The new man 
abhors and abjures the sins of which he was once 
capable, which did once fairly represent him, 
which can now represent him no more. Absolute 
justice can no longer insist on a present responsi- 
bility for them or present or future penalties for 
them. Sin repented is sin escaped. Holy quit- 
tance of sin is acquittance. The old guilt gone, 
the penalties of it have disappeared. God is 
just and the justifier of them that so believe. 

The life and death of Jesus mean the whole 
'* moral power '' side of the Atonement. All that 
ever Dr. Bushnell said of this side of the sublime 
work is true, and more than ever tongue can ex- 
press is there. But there is need of more, which 
mighty "more" the Atonement provides, Bushnell 
"tossed aside " much that we need cling to. For 
we are under terms of law and government and 
not merely of justice. Positive statutes are out 
and violated. We are all under condemnation. We 
need somewhat visible and tangible as to what 
God will do about His broken law. Some formu- 
lary, with substance under it, of forensic judicial 
performance which shall give the sanction of 
formal acquittance before the law we have broken, 
whose pronounced penalties we have incurred. 
God will remit them when He justly may. Under 
the old altar-forms, the sinner, repentant and con- 
fessing, promising amendment, brought another — 
a blameless life of dove or lamb, belonging to him, 



82 Reason and Faith 

his, which had cost him something. The peni- 
tent^s sin should be solemnly laid on that and its 
penalty. That substituted life, sacrificed, should 
be taken by Him who hath right to remit and 
to fix the terms of remission, as satisfaction of 
all the sinner's doom. He shall go free ! This 
was the fore-shadow of the Christ. On Him our 
iniquities were laid. The Cross was the world's 
altar. He bare our curse, took away our sins. 
They are gone that very hour when we in true 
repentance accept Him as our Sacrifice, — our 
substituted Life, — offered for our redemption. 
At the same moment and by the same grace 
through which alone the sacrifice avails, the 
penitent receives that regeneration of character 
which lifts him from the level of his past sin, 
and makes the whole transaction accord with the 
eternal equities. We become "Sons of God in- 
deed*' in the very act of entering the terms of 
legal acquittal. Our need, so far as the statutes 
go, is met by the exact terms which set us into 
the spiritual frames of holiness and love and life 
in Jesus. The Atonement is effective unto the 
repentance by which alone it becomes a * ' savor 
of life unto life "; and so God is just in lifting the 
penalties of explicit statute law from the head 
of the violator of it, as He is just in relieving 
from the general curse of guilt the soul which is 
escaped from the mastery of and present respon- 
sibility for it. So only could He be the enactor 
of ideal and absolute justice in the universe. 
Whatever of prudential exigency may lie in 



Reason and Faith 83 

this view of the final justice is fully met by the fol- 
lowing considerations : Remission of sins is seen 
to be prudentially possible if attended by these 
conditions : (i) If it as fully assures the after- 
holiness as the infliction of the penalty would 
do ; (2) If it as clearly demonstrates God's eternal 
and inflexible hostility to sin ; (3) If it as fully 
maintains the sacredness of the law; and (4) If it 
do nothing whatever to diminish the terrors of 
the law upon persistent and unrepentant evil- 
doers. It is not necessary here to go into detail 
to show that the justification of the repentant b}- 
faith does meet perfectly and over-go, by vast 
measures, each of these requirements. As to the 
first, the penalties of the law are not redemptive 
of the sufferer, but retributive and destructive; 
while this remission of sin to the penitent does 
redeem him, radically, into personal holiness for- 
ever more — and more! As to the second and 
third, the fact that none but the co-equal and 
eternal Son was a life exalted enough to be a 
substitute for ours before the violated law ; and 
that He, venturing into our place, must even die 
in our stead under the shameful agonies of the 
Cross to satisfy its claims, vindicates both God's 
unalterable hatred of sin and the law's sacred 
and absolute demands and penalties. As to the 
fourth particular, this remission to the penitent 
alone does actually set forth the terrors of retribu- 
tion, to those who will not repent, in so startling 
and stern a sort that no such sinner can ever be- 
lieve that the God who spared not His only and 



84 Reaso7i and Faith 

His beloved Son, when He stood in our stead, will 
now spare him if he refuse repentance and mercy, 
if he yet defy the law and abide in wanton sin. 
As matter of fact, it is only by vision of the 
Christ, dying to make mercy and salvation just 
and, so, possible, that men have, or do, or ever 
will, come to see their guilt and peril in such 
sort as to repent and turn from it. 

How then can we do else than say that Evan- 
gelical repentance is quittance and acquittance 
of sin and its penalties, in such sense that justice 
is absolutely served by it and on such terms as 
to meet the most exacting prudential and formal 
requirements of the Divine authority and govern- 
ment in this world and in all the universe ? On 
such terms as shall assure to the so redeemed the 
very loftiest type of personal and holy grandeur 
of which finite and created Being is capable ? 
Glory be to His great and just and holy Name ! 
Amen ! Let Earth and Heaven and every crea- 
ture say Amen and Amen ! 



Reason and Faith 85 



CHAPTER VI 

THK WONDKR OF THE WORD 

The Wo7'd of Gody which liveih and abideth forever — St. Peter 

The wonder of this Book seems to me not so 
much its contents — the facts of its revealing — 
considered by themselves, or in their mutual rela- 
tions (though it is wonderful in both these par- 
ticulars), but rather in its relations to the various 
stages of the progress of mankind. The miracle 
of the Book is not the source of it, supernal though 
it be ; nor the coherent consistency of its various 
parts, produced in so many ages, by so many 
diflFerent men, with so varied immediate mo- 
tives, under conditions not of similarity but 
of violent contrast ; the work of kings, priests, 
prophets, peasants ; outcome of periods of direct 
theocratic rule, of judgeships and kingdom ; of 
wandering escapes, prosperity and adversity ; 
anarchy and enslavement ; exile, captivity and 
restoration ; war and peace. That there could 
have come out of such work, by forty men, 
through millenniums of time, a book, or, if you 
choose, a literature, consistent with itself in all 
its parts, and bearing with unswerving emphasis 
to an end as single as it is sublime, is indeed a 



86 Reasoyi and Faith 

marvel, which they must account for who would 
rationally question its Divine inspiring. 

Far more wonderful, miraculous, than all this 
is the fact that this literature, born in the very 
ancient times, before the existence of any rational 
science of the world, or in it, should have fitted 
those times, been accepted and believed ; should 
have commanded life and builded character on 
sane lines ; directed national polity, fixed social 
and religious institutions, and become the secret 
of the most singular of racial developments, in so 
remote and dark a past, and yet should hold so 
commanding a power in these latest ages of most 
advanced scientific and philosophic thought and 
of social, political and moral progress. This is 
miracle of miracles ! 

For example, there appeared long ago, — 
whether you accept the extreme antiquity of the 
books of the Old Testament or the views of the 
most radical critics of to-day — either theory ante- 
dates far enough all developments of modernism, 
— there appeared an account of the order and 
process of the Creation. That account closely 
conforms to what is now held as the last word 
spoken by modern science in cosmogony. Grant- 
ing that specialists find obscure traces of a fourth 
day's creation in the third day's creative work in 
that great first chapter of Genesis. What of that ? 
Nobody disputes that the whole grand outline of 
process is correct. That sublime limning of the 
creative work is all that was either desired or 
proposed. Whether the process was an instan- 



Reason and Faith 87 

taneous one, or one complete in six creative days 
of twenty-four hours each, or an evolution through 
**days" which were creative ages, the order is 
the same. It was an order scoffed at the world 
over, exultingly denied, till in our own time it has 
been re-discovered and adopted by all scientific 
schools. Here then we have an account of the 
Creation and its order and processes which 
satisfied the earliest enquirers into these vast 
secrets, which stirred their sense of God, moved 
them to worship, kindled for them moral and 
spiritual inspirations, and helped to make them 
the progenitors of the highest spirituality of the 
race. It was a true account, not intended to 
teach geology or chronology in detail, but simply 
to hold the faith and mould for highest of then 
possible character the race to which it came. 
Theirs was a simple age. It knew no science as 
such. Of geology and geologic time they had no 
notion whatever. A revelation made to them in 
the terms of the modern conceptions of evolution- 
ary or geological processes would have been in- 
comprehensible and absurd ; could not have won 
credence or found any element of power ; would 
have been no revelation at all. The whole work 
of revelation in such terms would have been de- 
feated by the terms themselves. But here we 
have it, true for all ages, yet in such form as to 
be adjustable to the advancing knowledge of every 
period, from the simplest to the most highly de- 
veloped. Was that ever true of any other book ? 
For every advance of knowledge we find here in 



88 Reason and Faiih 

the account itself the key to the new interpreta- 
tion. See, for the word ''day" in the story. 
The first verses of the second chapter give you 
the word as signifying the whole creative period. 
Over and over in the same book of Genesis it is 
used in the same sense. When it became obvious 
to scientific knowledge of the facts that the earth 
underwent a long process of creation, there was 
no need to force the language of the story. There 
was no ''twisting and torturing" of the text, as 
has been so often and flippantly said. The old 
text was perfectly hospitable to the new under- 
standing of the facts. Nay, it had abundant rea- 
son to rejoice in the better knowledge which 
refuted the profane jeers of the disbelievers of 
many ages, and returned the faith of the civilized 
world to the substantial accuracy of that knowl- 
edge which could then have been gained only by 
revelation from God. The point of wonder is 
that an account of this vast business should have 
been given in that old time which did not offend 
its infantile intelligence, while yet it anticipated 
the finest discoveries of the ripest period of fullest 
research. 

So with the great astronomic facts in which 
the new light exults — the Mosaic "firmament." 
The ancient world, even far down to modern times, 
accepted it with its own interpretation as a solid 
arch supported on huge pillars or vast walls 
planted in the ocean which roared around the 
verges of the earth, or as a crystalline sphere or a 
series of them, enclosing each other and holding 



Reason arid Faith 89 

up the waters above or between them ; revolving 
the sun, moon, and stars, each fixed in a "firma- 
ment" of its own. Suppose that the story of 
Genesis had contained the detail of the modern 
science of astronomy ! No mortal, until these 
later times, could at all have comprehended or 
accepted such a revelation. It would have seemed 
absurd. It might as well not have been made 
till within the last century. All the effects of the 
revelation would have been lost and these cen- 
turies of light could not have arrived. When, at 
last, the old notions of the heavens were vanished, 
lo, there stands the great Revelation with its 
'* firmament," as hospitable to the new knowledge 
as it was hospitable and helpful in the times of 
the former ignorance. 

In the old days men were wont to attribute all 
that is to the immediate handiwork of God. Since 
there were so many things of so many sorts going 
on that one could not take care of them all, they 
supposed an innumerable host of gods, each look- 
ing after his own part of the business. When 
the one God thundered Himself back into the 
faith of Israel He revealed Himself in the terms 
of that universal idea as Himself doing directly 
all. So the revelation was comprehensible to 
them, took hold on them ; held, developed and 
made them believers and so made them great. 
Had it set forth the God in the terms of our 
modern understanding, He would have been no 
God at all. The modern understanding should 
never have come. Nevertheless, the old revela- 



go Reason and Faith 

tion was true, exactly as true now to us who hold 
that he does a multitude of things through 
secondary agencies; that He has set into nature 
force by which He accomplishes, as if He worked 
everything out by fingers, hands, and articulate 
words in some human tongue. There is neither 
deceit, illusion, nor mistake about it. It is but 
revelation of needed and helpful truth, partly or 
more fully made, in terms of their and our under- 
standing and as they and we were and are able to 
receive and get the advantage of it. 

Every advance of human understanding will 
lift the veil a little more fully from the partly con- 
cealed truth, will make the fuller interpretation 
and the more marvelously display the Divine 
wisdom and the holy art with which our God has 
adapted His one supreme written Revelation to 
that which He has made in Nature and in our 
own advancing intelligence and spiritual under- 
standing. That this could have been done in the 
Old Testament writings — that this ancient litera- 
ture could have been so supplemented and con- 
summated in the newer yet very old writings of 
the New Testament and in the new spirit of the 
Christ himself in such way that there should be 
no fatal break; that all should be, and should 
seem to be, one scheme of a progressive and now 
consummate Divine self-revealing, is the wonder 
of wonders — the miracle of miracles ! 

The wonder increases as it stands amidst com- 
mentaries of the obstinate and brutal reluctance 
of the ecclesiastics of all names and times to giv- 



Reason and Faiih 91 

ing up an ancient interpretation of the Word 
however irrational and absurd. It is not to be 
denied that theologians, councils, Popes and 
churches have again and ever again sought to 
chain the truth of the Divine revelation to their 
miserable interpretations and misinterpretations 
of it. It is a strange and awful story ! Men 
have been excommunicated, tortured, martyred 
because they came to think that the earth re- 
volved on its axis and around the sun, for does not 
the Book say that the "world is established that 
it shall not be moved " ? " The sun riseth and 
goeth down"? Multitudes have suflfered the 
like fates because they held the earth to be a 
globe ; that there might be inhabitants at the 
antipodes ; or because they did not hold that 
comets, diseases, and storms were the direct work 
of the Devil, or of God ; or for denial that all 
lunatics were possessed of evil spirits whom the 
priests could exorcise and cast out. Ponderous 
theologians have interpreted the poetical expres- 
sion " the windows of heaven" as absolute, 
literal, scientific fact, and set forth whole ranks 
of angels whose special duty was to open the lit- 
eral casements and let down upon the earth the 
waters stored up in the vast cisterns above the 
water-tight firmament ! Another rank of angels 
had for its work the labor of trundling out each 
morning from some store-house of God the sun 
for the day and the moon and stars for the night, 
and setting them in their places in the fixed frame- 
work of the heavens ! Witchcraft was the belief 



92 Reason and Faith 

of the church universal for how many dreary 
ages. Protestant Germany was for two centuries 
the fiercest murderer of innocent women, chil- 
dren, and men charged with the witches' hellish 
arts. A hundred thousand wretched creatures 
were tortured and executed in Germany in the 
hundred years from the middle of the sixteenth 
to that of the seventeenth century ! John 
Wesley, near the end of his life, declared that to 
surrender the belief in witchcraft would be to 
give up the whole Bible ! The literal creative 
day of twenty-four hours ; the certainty that He- 
brew was the original language which Jehovah 
spoke with Adam in the Garden ; the antiquity 
and inspiration of the Masoretic vowel points in 
the Hebrew — these were vital matters to the 
Orthodox Catholic faith, and the thunders of the 
church were launched against all unbelievers. 
For a long period the taking of interest for money 
loaned at any rate whatever was a mortal sin, 
banned by Papal authority, and so confined to 
the Jew alone, who accommodated the church- 
men, princes, prelates and Popes at enormous 
usury, and, demanding repayment, got confisca- 
tion, rack, thumb-screw, or lost not the money 
alone but liberty and even life. 

To these and a hundred other quite as absurd 
vagaries of interpretation the verities of faith 
have been tied up by the most solemn fulmina- 
tions of church authority, both Protestant and 
Catholic. The woes of the church have been 
hurled upon all disbelievers in these interpretings. 



Reason and Faith 93 

The Infallible Church has made these intolerable 
mal-interpretations of Scripture essential articles 
of faith, and doubt of them has been punished 
as Mortal Sin, worthy of present death and eter- 
nal torments. By each of them it has been long 
and fiercely affirmed that the Church, the Bible, 
and Religion must stand or fall. Over and over 
it has been contended that the Incarnation of our 
lyord, the entire Gospel, must be a lie if the rev- 
olution of the earth around the sun were a fact, 
or if the coming of a comet were a natural event, 
or if lunac}^ or disease were not a possession by 
infernal powers, to be treated by ecclesiastics and 
not by physicians. However it may be with the 
inerrancy of the Book or its original autographs, 
interpretations through sad ages by an infallible 
or a fallible church have made grievous work with 
it. They have bound the intellect and the heart 
and conscience of man to his vast hurt and long 
hindrance. For the slow and exceedingly danger- 
ous sweeping out of so many of these forced and 
false interpretations and illogical inferences we 
have to thank science — science oftenest in the 
hands of reverent Christian scholars, who suf- 
fered as infidels in their brave obedience to their 
high commission from God to defy for the truth's 
sake and Christ's and man's, an authority 
grounded neither in reason nor a worthy under- 
standing of the Divine Oracles. 

But the point on which I am insisting is that 
the wonder of the Word lies here ; in spite of all 
the settled and authoritative use of it to support 



94 Reason and Faith 

current absurdities as to actual fact, yet when any 
fact in nature or in life has once come to be 
settled, by science or a corrected interpreting of 
the Word, it immediately appears that the simple 
Word as it stands, without any twisting or forc- 
ing, is as hospitable to the new-found fact as to 
the old notion. The Book stands the only, and 
the everlasting, monument of a literature and 
law which have met the need and been hospitable 
to the current intellectual development of each 
age to which it has or was destined to come. All 
other literatures and bodies of law have gone ef- 
fete and obsolete with the civilization for which 
they were devised. This has but increased in 
glor5% wide fame and controlling power from age 
to age. It shines with increasing lustre in these 
boasiful latest times. It becomes the treasure of 
the literature of many tongues and the hope of 
the hearts of many peoples whom it is lifting from 
savagery into a gracious Christian civilization. 
The most keen and merciless critic and historian 
of the hideous fallacies of ecclesiastical interpreta- 
tion and the furies of ecclesiastical bigotry and 
cruelty affirms of the great old Book, '' Of all 
the Sacred Writings of the world, it shows us our 
own as the most beautiful and the most precious ; 
exhibiting to us the most complete religious de- 
velopment to which humanity has attained, and 
holding before us the loftiest ideals which our 
race has known.'* 

The Book of a religion which is to be universal 
must be a Book for all time and all peoples. That 



Reason and Faith 95 

is a criterion which no human genius could hope 
to meet. A Book which for all times, all races, 
all civilizations or lacks of civilization, in all lan- 
guages and under all circumstances, is to be and 
is loved, believed, reverenced and obeyed im- 
plicitly as the last word of truth, duty and priv- 
ilege is an achievement unapproachable, even 
unimaginable, to aspirations of sublimest human 
genius. There are some models of beauty in 
architecture which stand tbe criticism and win 
the admiration of the ages. There are some 
statues which embody a splendor of plastic art 
which will never be surpassed, calling forth an 
admiration which will never be outgrown. There 
are some canvases whose even, faded colors will 
be the despair and wonder of all artists to the 
latest time. There stand three or four poets and 
divine poems whose fame is like to be as lasting 
as the earth itself or as the love of beauty in the 
hearts of men. Yet these in their sovereignty 
claim no dominancy over the intelligence of men, 
no control of their faiths, no governance of their 
wills, no authority upon their morals, no guidance 
of their lives. But here is a Book which assumes 
to correct the intelligence, set the moral standards, 
master the will, mold the characters, shape the 
societies, and control the behaviors and even the 
affections of men — of all men everywhere and al- 
ways. A Book is this which, as a matter of un- 
disputed and indisputable fact, has done all these 
things for multitudes wherever it has been known, 
for millenniums. Its sway is at this moment 



96 Reason and Faith 

more widely extended than ever before. Its truth 
is leavening more thoroughly than in any preced- 
ing age all forms of truth avowed by civilized men 
and more pervasive of all literature. Its inter- 
pretations, save where an ''infallible" and intol- 
erant theolog}^ has forced them, have most 
perfectly fitted the highest possible holy efficiency 
of its revealings to every age to which it has come. 
And it has had a mightiest hand in the produc- 
tion of all that is worthiest in humanity. Its 
potency in the enlightened applications of its 
fullest revelation to our own day, in perfect ac- 
cord with all the finally ascertained facts of reason, 
science, and philosophy, is obviously the only 
possible solution of the sorest and most perilous 
problems of our — as of all — time, and is besides 
the mighty pledge of the solution of the immense 
questions of life and immortality beyond the veil. 
It is as unique as it is sublime. 

That Book ! Its supposed friends — its custo- 
dian church — have misconstrued and misrepre- 
sented, proscribed, banned, burned, and adored it ! 
They have wrought monstrous crimes and infinite 
charities and salvations in its name. Under its 
banners they have laid waste continents and up- 
builded splendid races from absolute savagery. 
For conservation of its supposed teachings they 
have withstood with fire and sword and rack the 
coming in of the new light which should but the 
more fully illumine and enforce its Divine mean- 
ing. Its enemies have ridiculed, defied and blas- 
phemed it and its truths and its God. On the 



Reason and Faith 97 

sites of their burnings of its most devoted adher- 
ents have risen vast structures for its universal 
distribution. The very room in Geneva in which 
Voltaire exultingly prophesied that in fifty years 
the Bible would be forgotten became the dis- 
tributing center for that Holy Word through 
Switzerland and continental Europe. Charles 
Bradlaugh's famous ' ' Hall of Science, ' ' seat of an 
atheistic propaganda in London for twenty years, 
has passed into the hands of the Salvation Army ! 
The great old Book has suffered enough at the 
hands of its friends to have blotted any other book 
that was ever written out of the firmament of the 
world's literature. Its enemies have scorned and 
confuted and annihilated it out of the faith of 
the whole earth times out of number, but for all 
that it has thriven only the more securely in the 
unfading love and loyalty of an ever-increasing 
multitude of happy and holy believers who are 
living joyful lives of its grace and would, if need 
were, lay them down serenely for the sake of its 
sacred Name. 

My contention is that a book or literature, of 
commanding truth, put in such shape as to win 
the acceptance, form the character, and mold the 
destinies of the simplest ancient times, building 
them into a Divine faith of incomparable value 
and beauty, into a reverent and worshipful frame 
obedient to the best righteousness which they 
could comprehend, and ever, from age to age, 
into a better than anything that had preceded, 
then at the end of the progress of light and right 



98 Reason and Faith 

thus far in the advancing centuries, proving itself 
absolutely harmonious with the new universe of 
scientific and philosophic truth as it is now under- 
stood, and as effective for faith and character as it 
has ever been, demonstrates its Divine origin as 
demonstration could by no other means have 
been effected, as can by no means be contro- 
verted. The very fact that it has been so long 
and bitterly misunderstood and set into antag- 
onism with the ripening results of rational inves- 
tigation, that those results were so fiercely battled 
against and so reluctantly admitted by the parti- 
sans of the old interpretations, is the best possible 
vindication of the fact that it can be no product 
of man's genius, but a literature of the Divine 
inbreathing. 

There has come at last, thank God, through all 
the Protestant Churches in the most enlightened 
quarters of the earth, a serene certitude that all 
truth is one, that no discovery of fact in the uni- 
verse can be irreconcilable with any other. Faith, 
therefore, simple and unperturbed, waits for the 
demonstration of truth in any realm of it and 
by any process; holds to the old till the new is 
ascertained ; is wholly ready to accept whatever 
is duly determined by the recognized authorities 
in the varied fields of research ; and rejoices in 
every new ray of light thrown into the secrets of 
the working of the God of Nature and of Reve- 
lation. The same spirit is penetrating, more 
slowly but as surely, the old church which has 
claimed infallibility. Because of that claim it 



Reason and Faith 99 

has the harder task ; so difiScult, I believe, that 
it will have to give up its age-long boast of 
having everywhere and always believed and pro- 
claimed a perfect and consistent doctrine in every 
" Ex- Cathedra " utterance. Such surrender is 
inevitable, and will only establish it on a firmer 
basis of truer faith and power. 

This joyful welcome to new light all around the 
ecclesiastical horizon, whencesoever the shining 
may come, will bring all churches and religious 
systems and sympathies into vital unity and a 
vital power which will conciliate the confidence 
of candid humanity and hasten the day of the 
Gospel's triumph and the world's consummation. 
Ripening science and philosophy, systematizing 
all known truth and seeking the yet undiscovered 
through all the realms of Nature, will find the 
harmonizing supplement to all their truth and 
the final reason for all, and their unifying prin- 
ciple, in the Book ; will find in those who love 
it their most ardent champions and devoted in- 
vestigators. The reason and the heart of the 
Christian world will no more antagonize any 
candid investigation or fair settlement of any 
truth in any realm of human enquiry. 

Kven in the regions of the ''higher criticism" 
the Christian consciousness only waits for some- 
what to be agreed on and fairly established. It 
understands that every exhibition of nervousness 
and irritability in the face of these enquiries is a 
demonstration of its own uncertainty about the 
foundations of faith, unbecoming and impossible 

LcfC 



lOO Reason and Faith 

to the real believer. It is fully justified in that 
waiting till the devout critics can agree. We 
have no business to go rushing into new notions 
till the *' notions" are settled into facts. The 
settled facts will be accepted. The Book will be 
found unmarred. The old foundations of its truth 
will be unshaken though a thousand human in- 
terpretations and understandings of it may be 
dispersed to the four winds, to the glory of God. 
Every Word of God, written on parchment or 
graven in Nature, abideth forever. Every au- 
thentic Word of God, wherever written, is for 
the heavenly upbuilding of man into a final estate 
of God-likeness. In the one system of the uni- 
verse no one fact can be at odds with any other 
fact. No one truth can root out any other truth, 
or mar it. The Spirit of God is under every rev- 
elation in what we call * ' Nature ' ' as in what we 
call ' * Revelation. ' ' Only let the men of Science, 
of Philosophy, and of Religion be cool, candid ; 
till each his own field, and wait until a truth is 
decided and agreed upon by its qualified experts 
before they announce it. The only science which 
is to be dreaded is that which boasts itself as 
omni-science ! That science is falsely so called 
which, knowing something about an Earth- 
Worm, supposes itself, therefore, to know all 
that can or can not be known of God and the 
soul and the ongoings of the infinite. Only let 
the men of each field of truth stand to their own 
work in their own lots, find the truth in their 
own lines and trust each other, and there will 



Reason and Faith loi 

be not only no further semblance of ''warfare'* 
between science and religion — as there never 
has been any in reality — but there will be no 
more conflict between science and theology, or 
between the men of science and of the church. 
These conflicts have been precipitated too often — 
necessitated, glorious in outcome — by the church 
itself, presenting its strange interpretations, its 
imperfect theologies, and its yet more imperfect 
life as the only and as the all of religion. God 
and all good men hasten the great day of the 
final truce — the recognized harmony of all truth, 
gathered from whatever fields of Divine revealing 
for human discovery ! In that great day it shall 
be seen,— THE BOOK,— epitome of all sub- 
limest truth, source of vital power, way of grace, 
secret of redemption, radiant with the glory of 
man and God ! Speed its mighty revealings ! 
Hasten its rising as the Sun of Righteousness 
upon the horizons of every race ! God give wis- 
dom, zeal, amplest means and swiftest success 
to every agency which seeks its universal dif- 
fusion, its perfect understanding and its divine 
dominancy over the heart and life, the business, 
society and government of every man at home 
and in the uttermost parts of the earth and the 
sea ! Amen and Amen ! 



I02 Reason and Faith 



CHAPTER VII 

WHY I BKlvlKVK IN GOD 

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. — King David. 

I AIRWAYS did believe in Him, even when, with 
shame I say it, even when my heart was full of 
impotent rage against Him, or rather against the 
being I took Him for. Probably that was because 
I was taught so to believe. I took this faith just 
as I believed what people told me about Europe, 
or the stars ; just as children believe fairy stories 
and Ghris Kringle. Father, mother, everybody 
else around took God for granted, so the child did, 
as matter of course. It never occurred to the 
child to question His being, all-power, wisdom, 
goodness, and so on. 

Then I suppose before reason begins to weigh 
these matters there is in eflfective play a sort of 
universal, at any rate, a powerful and very widely 
diffused instinct for God which chimed in well 
with the surrounding atmosphere of theistic be- 
lieving, which grounded the belief of Him, that . 
is, of some sort of a God — would, perhaps, have 
done it without any teaching whatever. For 
all races of men, without any fairly proven excep- 
tion, even in the most infantile savagery, anterior 



Reason and Faith 103 

to any development of a real public opinion, do 
fall into some notion of a Power above and be- 
yond them, which notion stands for God, or gods, 
worship, and religion. It curiously happens, 
also, that progress made and advance in intel- 
ligence and civilization do not tend to confuse 
and destroy this original impulse of faith, but 
the rather to clarify and develop it and to es- 
tablish some more or less fit cultus of outward 
observance for its more thorough grounding. 
Nay, it is even philosophically and scientifically 
observed that the crude religious ideas of any 
people and their rituals of Divine observance 
are often the prime factors as well as heralds and 
auspicious portents, of intellectual, social, moral, 
and governmental advance. So one can not de- 
clare, does not know, whether this constitutional 
bias towards some shape of theism would not, 
independently of teaching and of reasoning, have 
landed him in an almost inexpugnable conviction 
of a Supreme and Eternal One. 

One must suppose, also, that his earliest no- 
tions about the qualities, functions, attributes of 
this God came from current teachings about him, 
not questioned yet by the unreasoning intelli- 
gence of the child. He has taken it all in a 
lump on trust. There it lies in his little soul, 
undisturbed and undigested, just as it was re- 
ceived. There it may lie through childhood, 
youth, manhood, old age, and know no perturba- 
tion for time or eternity. There it may live, 
thrilling with power, abolute in control, molding 



I04 Reason and Faith 

and mastering every force of the active and be- 
nignant life, unchallenged and fraught with fine 
salvations, working out a serene and beautiful 
simplicity of character, basis of a holy group of 
love's master passions — motive and great reward 
of all in the soul and in its performance. Blessed 
that simple faith which never knew a question 
and is incapable of a doubt ; that believing which 
at first depends implicitly on authority and in- 
stinct, and then afterwards reaches up to grasp 
the Great Reality by a conscious experience 
which is like vision, which is demonstration to 
him who so sees — demonstration which no argu- 
ment of doubt and no difficulty in actual observa- 
tion or experience can ever for a moment perturb. 
Blessed indeed, but it may be not the supremely 
blessed. It may well be that the struggles with 
candid doubt, the struggles that overcome, even 
through agonies and perils, are cultures of char- 
acter, and evolutions of power and ways of an 
ultimate beauty and joy beyond all that these 
undisturbed serenities could ever have wrought 
for the souls of men. Bunyan's terrific battles 
in the precincts of the ' ' City of Destruction ' ' 
were the secret of his mastery in the Christian 
Pilgrimage. Hardihood, militant aggressiveness 
and stalwart massiveness of faith and character 
are like to come of these successful wrestles with 
candid doubt which make it pay in the long run. 
Experts through great and perilous experiences, 
tried souls mighty in trained attack and defense — 
what in grand exploit and adventure and hardy 



Reason and Faith 105 

enterprise may not the untried and boundless 
worlds beyond have in store for such equipped 
and seasoned spirits ? O, this future of the other 
worlds ! It must present vast necessities, im- 
mense vicissitudes, incomparable enterprises to 
break the monotonies and rouse the enthusiasms 
and create the majesties of eternity, to make 
Heaven sublime. What journeyings, moment- 
ous missions, soul-kindling responsibilities and 
hardy adventures shall fall to the lot of God's 
sturdiest saints, messengers of grace and princes 
of eternal kingdoms amongst the huge, innumer- 
able worlds of His boundless empire of the forever 
and ever ! This life is, at best and largest, but a 
preparatory kindergarten arrangement for the real, 
maturing life that is beyond, which is to open on 
us in the vast reality of the endless to-morrow. 
Who knows but that every struggle and over- 
coming in the realms of candid doubt may be the 
method of a victorious prowess in the hereafter, 
which could not else have been achieved ? Nay, 
that is it. That must be its inevitable result. 

But to come back to our way of faith in God. 
By and by, out of childhood's sweet believing, 
reason will assert itself. ' ' Why ' ' will become 
the immense imperative. It can not be repressed 
and must not. Mere authority will not answer. 
Tradition, or a sheer "taking for granted," won't 
do any longer. Investigation of facts, reasons, 
conditions, must begin, and shall never end. 
Woe waits him who would set it bounds. It 
breaks through all prescription, ventures into the 



io6 Reason and Faith 

most sacredly guarded enclosures. Most surely 
of all, because the most solemn field of all, most 
fraught with destinies, will it enter the sacred 
secrets of the soul, its origin, destiny, liberties 
and obligations ; into the holy habitations of God 
himself, to know his being, his laws, his character, 
his relations to his universe and all the souls of 
it. These questions will not down at any bidding. 
If there be claim of authoritative revelation 
along these lines, that claim will be scanned with 
intensest scrutiny, the bases of it investigated 
with most careful concern. On these questions, 
least of all, will awakened reason rest on inade- 
quate authority. It ought not so to rest. It 
must sift the authorities. 

Now, when this enquiring begins, sound reason 
will make account of the common consent with 
which the belief in God has been held and taught. 
That good and loving and holy souls have believed 
so long, so widely, so thoroughly and to such 
sweet and grand results in character and perform- 
ance as their faith has surely wrought, will give 
a basis for the reasonable presumption that their 
faith is well grounded. Reason will not believe 
that sheer falsehood can work so well ; can not 
rashly toss that proof of God aside. 

Then if multitudes of people, wise and just and 
good, shall testify that, through their faith in 
God, they have come to an actual fellowship with 
and personal experience of Him, it will be a brash 
and uncandid spirit that shall, without sturdiest 
reasons, brush such testimonies aside as not going 



Reason and Faith 107 

far to prove the mighty existence in which they 
have so effectively believed. 

Then if not these only — but all men have a 
natural aptitude, instinct, for believing in Him — ^ 
that will seem to reason a strong added presump- 
tion of his actual existence. For when men see 
an eye they infer light ; a fin, they say water ; 
wings and lungs prove air ; a foot, solid surface 
for its standing. Speech means a hearer ; thought, 
objects of thought ; love, the beloved. Reason, 
recognizing these universal correspondencies, 
finding a universal instinct and impulse toward 
believing in God, will hesitate to deny that it 
does, powerfully, declare the fact of God. 

So the argument starts with a strong theistic 
presumption, which far more than neutralizes any 
conceivable antecedent improbability in the mat- 
ter. Now pure reason takes note of the obvious 
facts of this material universe. Its vastness 
astonishes and bewilders. Its immensity of re- 
sistless forces amazes. Its innumerable forms of 
matter, its wonderful variety of organisms, the 
intricate delicacy of the millions of organic struc- 
tures, the exquisite workmanship displayed in 
organs of creatures so minute that only the most 
powerful microscope can reveal them to the eye 
of man, all these combine to overwhelm us in 
amazement. Then the enduement of inorganic 
matter with its afiinities, its cohesions, its gravita- 
tions, its crystallizations, its electric forces, its 
adaptations for transmutation into new and wholly 
alien forms of vegetable and animal organism — 



io8 Reason aiid Faith 

a miracle, indeed, which evolutionists like I^e 
Conte and Dawson and many more declare that 
mere evolution can never account for — are subjects 
of new wonder. This income of life itself, in the 
vegetable world, enfolded in a seed, laying hold 
on all the elements of earth, air, water, using 
sunlight and shadow, heat and cold, chemical 
afl&nities and electric mysteries, cohesions and 
gravity, and building out of the same soils and 
climates — by some witchcraft of its own — a rose, 
a lily, a weed, an oak, a luscious fruit, culling out 
its flavors, its colors, its forms, with so subtle an 
art that man can never even account for or so much 
as follow its selections or its processes, will chal- 
lenge reason. 

As you see the gentle surrender of this whole 
realm of the vegetable life to the necessity and 
the development of the higher order of the animal 
world, what words can express the perfectness of 
the complete adaptation, or the wonder of it. In 
the animal, what labarynthine construction in 
each organ, itself made up of many intricate ma- 
chines ! Then the adjustment of organ to organ, 
the symmetrical emplacement of each to the needs 
of all, and their interplay in the final unity of a 
miracle of beauty, agility, strength, and glad 
utility will cry out, '*How comes it?^' The 
whole marvellous creature, put in control of a 
nervous center, with its radiating net- work of 
nerves, communicating the fiat of the will to every 
organ of the wonderful whole and commanding 
its instant obedience and utmost tensity of action. 



Reason and Faith 109 

Now add to this marvellous thing of organism, 
not merely sensation, perception, intelligence, 
consciousness, will, — but conscience, the moral 
imperative, love, hate, worship, power of self- 
sacrifice, joy and sorrow, hope, the free society of 
men at the top of the observed order of things. 
For after all the wonder of the universe is not 
its units of matter or of life, or of intelligence, or 
of conscience, but the unity of them all in the 
absolute oneness of the universe. The miracle 
of the plant is not its blossom but its root, stem, 
leaf, blossom, fruit, parentage ; its relation to 
soil, rain, air, sun, gravitation ; to the inorganic 
of which it thrives on the one hand, and to the 
sustenance, happiness, joy of all the realms of 
life above its own to which it contributes itself. 
The amazement of the thoughtful observer is not 
at the structure of the eye, or ear, or foot of the 
animal, marvellous as is each, but at the infinitely 
curious and exact collocation of all into that 
supple, agile, beautiful, powerful creature, or 
into the man, with his intelligence, will, morality, 
soulhood, linked in with all the natural forces of 
the universe, matter, cohesion, gravitation, 
chemical and electric forces, the sun the stars, 
and all the ongoing of past time and coming 
eternities. Each individual entity, from least to 
greatest, linked indissolubly into every other 
entity of all the earth, the sun, the stars, for ever 
and ever — that is the wonder. Convulsions ages 
and ages ago heaved up the continents and tossed 
to their heights the hills and mountain ranges of 



no Reason and Faith 

to-day's life and delight for man. Ages of ice 
ground out our fertile soils, digged out our fair 
valleys, smoothed the sites of our great cities, and 
ploughed the mighty water-ways for our com- 
merce. Nothing is, or ever was, that has not 
played with admirable exactness into every other 
thing that is or has been. The universe is one 
mighty harmony so complex and amazing as to 
bewilder and overwhelm. Its infinitely varied 
individual features are contrived to play their 
functions into the great whole. Each is for the 
infinite all and the infinite all is for each, on one 
plan that runs through every orb and atom, every 
life and movement of the creation. 

Reason looks on with increasing wonder as 
every access of intelligence widens its horizon. 
It cries "plan"! "A Planner, then." Contriv- 
ings mean a Contriver. These innumerable con- 
trivings, all on one system, however varied their 
functions, indicate a Designer. Their multitude 
and sweep and majesty indicate a designer of im- 
measurable intelligence, resources, and power. 

But beyond this, this plan through all the uni- 
verse tends, so far as we can see it, to the service 
of one order of being. The inorganic bears up 
the organic. The organic ministers to the higher, 
conscious, sentient animal life. These orders of 
the inorganic, the vegetable, and the sentient ani- 
mal life all serve man — the one being endowed 
with reason, conscience, moral and spiritual life. 
Science, philosophy and all reason unite to per- 
ceive that man is the consummate flower, the 



Reason and Faith iii 

reigning king in this earth. Whether you believe 
the new theories of evolution or hold the older 
notions of man's incoming, still the man is the 
aim of all nature, the unifying element of its 
significance, the obvious design and ultimate, 
supreme outcome. 

Now reason gets busy with man himself, makes 
analysis of him, finds the body wonderful, con- 
necting him with the whole material universe; 
the intellect far beyond that of any other creature 
and capable of indefinite development ; a will that 
is free ; nigh infinite sensibilities to pleasure or 
pain ; a necessity for discriminating in every act 
between what is right and wrong, and a character 
which grades him as worthy of praise or blame, 
to be loved or abhorred. Up towards this being 
the innumerable designs in all below do visibly 
and undeniably tend. To produce, sustain, and 
develop this free moral character, capable of 
an immense and enchanting beaut}^ and power, 
worthy of infinite and everlasting praise and 
love, all the lesser and the larger contrivings 
fit wonderfully into each other and all together 
press towards this — press towards and produce 
this ! Millions of special contrivings, amazing 
in themselves, all work together absolutely, and 
all sweep on to this ! What can reason say ? If 
contrivance mean a Contriver, what an infinite 
Contriver have we found here ! If all this infinite 
contriving means this moral character of such 
beauty and loveliness and everlasting strength at 
the top and the end of the planning, and if holy 



112 Reason a?id Faith 

design signifies anything as to the designer, what 
shall sound reason say of this Designer ? If even 
men of pure science declare that they find, at 
start and movement of all things in the universe, 
an ever-present and active Force that makes 
for righteousness, tell me. What of that Power ? 
It is vast beyond any human limitations, wise 
and resourceful beyond conceiving. Its normal 
running makes for weal, beauty, righteousness 
and joy. Its consummation is a superb and holy 
moral character. That designing Power, then, 
must be moral, must be an infinite holiness and 
love. If a distorted reason should so misinterpret 
the working of this scheme of things as to esteem 
it tending to misery in estate and evil in char- 
acter, it would yet have to say, '' an infinite, but 
a devil on the universal throne." The argu- 
ment, from the evil that is permitted in the world, 
that the designing and governing power of it is 
such an infinte malignant, has been, I hope, 
sufficiently disposed of in a previous discourse. 
Atheistic argument, there is none. As matter of 
fact, there is no name of any prominence in the 
ranks of scientific, philosophic or other thought, 
of a man who will declare himself an atheist 
to-day. That there are declared agnostics in 
plenty is true enough, but the wild voice of the 
atheist is heard only in ranks of a mad revolt 
against all law, order, property and life, amongst 
the wild beasts who roar against civilization and 
for chaos. For the evil that is in the world, for 
which the free will of man is alone responsible, 



Reason and Faith 113 

the matchless grace of God has provided sovereign 
remedy, free, rich, and tender as a Father's love, 
as the heart of Jesus, and glorious as highest 
Heaven ! Friends, when we have seen that possible 
evil is the sole possibility of character, as I hope 
we have, and that the most radiant of all char- 
acter must be outcome of experience in tremend- 
ous conflict with evil, and that the plan of God 
is actually developing, at the top of the universe ; 
that character in splendid perfectness, in innum- 
erable multitudes, in the vast majority of all 
souls ; when we know that no soul, in any world, 
will ever suffer one feather's weight beyond its 
just desert, after all palliating circumstances are 
given their full force before the bar of a gentle 
justice, I believe that sound reason can leave all 
special instances of extremest ill, in absolute peace, 
to the holy administration of a God who is kinder 
than man, and freely consent that there must be 
mysteries in his conduct of universal ajBFairs, with 
which we have neither the powers nor any bus- 
iness to meddle. However it may be with others, 
I have detailed, with as much distinctness as I 
have been able, the process of arrival, by one soul, 
at least, at a happy theistic rest, a repose of trust 
on which it is able to stake its eternal destinies, 
by which it can live in joy, and be not afraid nor 
reluctant to die. That God, as Author of all, 
sustainer, ruler, a just and holy and most loving 
personal One, working all things from the Crea- 
tion to the redemption and consummation of all, 
for the establishment and the glory of an uni- 



114 Reason and Faith 

versal Kingdom ' ' wherein dwelleth righteous- 
ness " and Righteousness only, seems tome the 
only working theory which can account for the 
universe, which does account for it satisfactorily 
to reason, leaving but a fringe of mystery, exactly 
as should be in a scheme of the Infinite before 
a finite intelligence. Such a God seems to me 
the only hypothesis which can avert despair, 
which can consist with any sound and happy 
sanity ! It seems to me that, on the simple con- 
siderations which we have now taken, without 
taking into view the more metaphysical lines of 
argumentation, without reckoning at the aspira- 
tions of the soul as for a kinship with some Higher 
Soulhood, of the spirit in man as stretching itself 
upward as by some spiritual gravitation towards a 
spiritual universe which attracts it by natural law, 
and wherein it may find its grandest, its only real 
function. I say that, on the simple considera- 
tions we have now taken, it seems to me that the 
soundest reason will not hesitate to believe in 
God, — that HE IS, nor to adopt the immortal 
utterance of that Apostle who knew Him best, 
when he affirms by inspiration of the Holy Ghost, 
that ^^ God is LOVE." 



Reason and Faith 115 



CHAPTER VIII 

A CONCI.USION OF SOUND REASON. 

Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. As for me and my 
house, we will serve the Lord. — Joshua. 

If a God, and such a God, what then ? Wh}^ 
then he is a very considerable figure in His uni- 
verse ! A factor indeed ! The factor worth con- 
sidering. Without the God there is no possible 
doctrine of a soul independent of matter. There 
is nothing but matter in the various forms and 
stages of temporary arrangement. There is no 
life except of the material organization, and 
dependent on it. When the organization is dis- 
rupted the life is gone annihilate. There is for 
it no future. There is no soul. There is no 
basis for morality save a mere transient utility, 
which has no voluntary quality, but is merely 
automatic — atomatic. A utility is that at which 
only the very highest and most uncommon 
organizations will ever arrive, which can only 
provide distant and uncertain motives, which 
can not curb the appetites and passions craving 
immediate gratification; which can not give com- 
mand to any altruistic or remote considerations 
whatever. In the grave uncertainty of any to-mor- 
row the to-day will forever carry the day — ought 



ii6 Reaso7i and Faith 

to do it, so far as there can be any ' ' ought ' ' at 
all. But on this basis there is none. You say- 
that there ' ' ought " to be consideration for the 
other living, conscious organisms ? Why these 
living things, you and other, are but the necessary 
play of material atoms ! Necessary ? Then 
automatic ! There is no will, no liberty. If 
they chance to play in such sort as to advantage 
their fellow organisms, that is well enough, — but 
if they do not, nobody is to blame. There is no 
more room for praise or blame at the play of these 
atoms in the brain of a man than for the play of 
kindred atoms in the atmosphere, in the lower 
animal, in the roots of a noxious plant. Morality 
is gone forever with God and the soul as inde- 
pendent of matter and its organic play. All 
effective sanctions of action are gone when action 
is absolutely determined by the collocation of 
material atoms in the physical structure. On 
this scheme there can have been no plan whatever 
in the universe. It can be but the fortuitous 
onrunning of mere chance. There can be no 
such logical idea even as that of fate, for fate 
means a somewhat which fixes it. Fate, on the 
materialistic theory, means nothing but chance. 
On the materialistic no-God, no-soul-theory, there 
can be no reason, no motive, no right, no wrong, 
no object save the momentary gratification of 
the momentary impulse. If anybody can see 
anything but hell in that, why, then, he can be 
nothing but a beast. But now, God is. He 
created all, no matter whether by direct immediate 



Reason and Faith 117 

creative fiat or through secondary agencies, in a 
moment or by processes ages long and still con- 
tinuing. He is sustaining all, whether by direct 
upholding or by that fixity of method which we, 
for convenience, call *'law," but which we can 
never define save as an observed method. 

If this be true, a thing follows, as light the 
sun. We and all things are His. The "fee- 
simple'' of all that is is vested in Him. There 
is, can be, no title in the universe, to any hold- 
ing but such as is derived from Him. You, I, 
all men, and all the things they may have, are 
His of absolute and eternal right — not yours, 
mine or theirs, but His. If you have produced 
anything it is by the powers with which He 
endued you. You wrought with the materials 
which He put at your disposal in the time He has 
given for His service. The title to possession of 
all you have wrought is in Him alone. Logic, 
then, law, natural, common, universal and neces- 
sary — afl&rm the inexpugnable title of this Creator 
and sustainer of the worlds to us and to all that 
the worlds contain. As we are free moral agents 
with logical and moral powers, there is but one 
attitude in which we can rationally stand towards 
Him. That is the attitude of a complete consent 
to his control as absolutely and forever and in all 
things His. The holding of yourself or of any- 
thing that is in your hands as against His right 
of immediate control, is an attempted robbery 01 
God. An unsuccessful and disastrous attempt 
at that, but none the less criminal for its hope- 



ii8 Reason and Faith 

lessness, and all the more absurd — absurd even 
to the ludicrous ! The attitude of any soul 
believing in God, yet failing to recognize him as 
his owner by an absolute title, is one of flagrant 
dishonesty. Such a one is an attempting embez- 
zler of all that he is and of all that he can lay his 
hands on. And that attempt, too, is on the 
most shameful terms of gross ingratitude, for all 
he is and has are the vast trust which that God, 
the owner, has reposed in him for his culture, 
development and happiness, and for the great 
uses of the kingdom of righteousness and peace 
and beauty in these circles of humanity. It is 
not merely a common crime of embezzlement, but 
the aggravated one of the embezzlement of be- 
nevolent and trust funds and forces. Take heed, 
my friends. This were very serious breach of 
manly honor. From it any honesty ought to 
recoil. Are you, then, holding yourself and all 
that the good God has intrusted you with as His 
agent and steward, not as your own, but as His 
very own ? 

As our absolute owner He is, of course, our 
Master, with fullest authority upon us. For all 
our being and our doing we are immediately 
responsible to him. Our employments, recrea- 
tions, societies, studies, are at His option. Our 
emplacements, conditions and all that, are matter 
for His control and approval. Now this is not 
wild exhortation, but merely statement of the 
very coldest conclusions in sheer logical neces- 
sity from the admitted fact of a God, whose we 



Reason and Faith 119 

are — conclusions from which none who believe in 
such a God can escape. Every proclamation of 
duty must have logical basis of common reason. 
Here is such reason irrefragable, which simply, 
but imperiously, calls every man to recognize his 
responsibility under it. 

But now we must remember that this God of 
ours is a ruler and king in His universe. He has 
wider responsibilities than those that connect 
with our individual concerns, or even with the 
concerns of this world. Our performance affects 
others more widely than we are apt to think, 
may well reach more widely than we can possibly 
know. His right to govern absolutely His king- 
doms, the realms of His own creation no sanity 
can question. If He rule them not, who shall? 
Who can? But rightful rule involves a loyal 
obedience. If God be a King by unquestionable 
title, then are we his bounden subjects, owing an 
allegiance as perfect as His Sovereign Right. To 
refuse such loyal allegiance is rebellion, anarchy ; 
high, aye, highest treason ! As that government 
is just, holy, for highest weal of all the earth, as 
it is the only government of it that is either 
rightful in authority, adequate in resources or in 
power, the only one that is even conceivable, the 
crime of refusing to take the oath of allegiance, 
and of actual neglect of the duties of loyalty be- 
comes to reason the more monstrous and insane. 
It is, so far as that soul's power is concerned, the 
upturning of the government, the only possible 
government of the world and of the universe. It 



I20 Reaso7t and Faith 

is the bringing in of chaos, so far as his act can 
do it. It is the supreme of sin, — of moral and 
mortal crime. Now again this is not pas- 
sionate and wild rhetoric, but only the very 
coldest of unimpeachable logic. Every hamlet, 
city, state, nation, must have a government with 
its laws and administrations. Without these 
there could be no order, security of useful labor, 
property or life. So in the great world or the uni- 
versal realms there must be governor and gov- 
ernment. For you or me to fling out of this vast 
administration of God in His world is indeed the 
supreme of guilt. No harm, except to myself, in 
this revolt of so insignificant an item as my soul ? 
Well, I have no right, in defiance of God, to hurt 
or destroy my own soul. It is outrage on Him 
to hurt, shame or destroy it. It is His treasure, 
His glory, the one significance of all. But the 
guilt of such rebellion is as if I had the power to 
overturn the very throne of the King Himself. 
This sort of personal disloyalty has filled the 
earth in all its ages with miseries intolerable, 
with shames past name or number, wrecking 
bodies of men, pulling in pieces homes and 
hearts, breaking down morality, bringing ages to 
shame and destroying great nations and races of 
mankind in all the agonies in which nations 
have had the way of perishing. I^et no meanest 
and least significant of men imagine that his 
revolt from God is innocuous because he is himself 
insignificant. That is a devil's lie. His revolt 
is the supreme of the guilt of which he is capable. 



Reason and Faith 121 

That is the cool pronunciation of logical reason 
in the premises. 

But now this government and administration 
of the Sovereign of the worlds is so absolutely 
just that revolt from it is proof of a character so 
deformed as to shock all moral ideals. Besides 
the rightful authority for rule this King has 
every imaginable qualification for a perfect ad- 
ministration of perfect and beneficent laws. He 
has absolute knowledge, perfect insight of char- 
acter, motive, performance in the soul of every 
one of His subjects. He knows absolutely how 
to fit means to ends. He has ample resources of 
power to back and enforce His government. 
His is the only rule on earth in which no subject 
has ever suffered or ever can suffer any instance 
or any measure of injustice at governmental 
hands. That He has not shut out all evil from 
His universe is only because he must leave men 
free in order to moral being. All the real evil, 
injustice, wrong of this or any world has been in 
the way of revolt against the just and holy law 
and person of the Divine Ruler of all. No man 
has ever suffered or ever shall at the hand of 
God any feather's weight of wrong. If he suffer 
so at the hand of man the hand that strikes the 
blow crashes first through the aegis of the Divine 
protection, dashes aside in sacrilegious defiance 
the safeguards of the Divine law, and shall suffer 
the just Divine avenging. The secret, then, 
of revolt against God and His government 
must be a deep unlove for the righteousness and 



122 Reason and Faith 

holiness of it and of Him. That rule hedges him 
in from a thousand evil and hurtful things and 
shuts him up to the things that are sweet and 
pure and holy. So come his alienations and 
rebellions. So have come all that has outraged 
man and wrecked the ages. It has been wrought 
in despite of God. 

Now this God is in His own person the perfec- 
tion of all that is great in wisdom, power, justice, 
truth, therefore to be admired of all the right- 
hearted of the moral universe. But He is the 
eternal goodness as well. The perfection of all 
love and loveliness is in Him. The normal, sane, 
holy of the whole creation wonder at, love and 
adore Him. The sinless angels bow down before 
Him with ascriptions of ecstatic worship. The 
white-robed saints sing the lofty songs of ever- 
lasting praise. There is nothing in Him to repel 
any just, pure and holy soul, but everything to 
attract and hold it in everlasting and enthusiastic 
delight. All perfections in Him are infinite. 
Flaws and faults to repel there are none. Rever- 
ence, aw^e, adoration are the natural, the inevit- 
able outcome in any normal spirit. Who has it 
not is in some strange attitude of intellectual 
illusion or moral obliquity. Worship thou the 
God over all, blessed forever ! 

But now this God has watched over an erring 
and sinful world with an infinite patience and for- 
bearance, trained it in a slow and reluctant knowl- 
edge of Himself, taught it as it was able to bear 
the instruction, prepared it to the fuller and final 



Reason and Faith 123 

revelation, then came, out of all dimness and dis- 
tance, showed His very face, heart, will, in Jesus 
of Nazareth. The Man Divine ! The Man Beau- 
tiful ! Seeing Him so, we have not merely good- 
ness, mercy and righteousness, but Love in its 
loftiest form, and infinite in its measurelessness. 
A love is manifest in Him of the Holy for the 
unholy, a pity that knows no bounds, that will 
uplift the very nature of the evil into a holiness 
that shall mean eternal beatitude ; that shall set 
the weakest and frailest of sinful men into the 
grandeur of His own likeness and the splendor 
of fellowship with Himself in His eternal Home. 
A love it is which will do this, not by an easy fiat, 
but by an infinite sacrifice, of Himself, through 
a life of humiliation, exile, weariness and pain, 
bearing all the ills of a poverty-smitten humanity; 
through a death of infamy and anguish, bearing 
the sins of a world and all its evil ages as if they 
had been His own ; bearing them in extremest 
agony in the Garden and on the Cross, expi- 
ating them in His own body and soul, on the 
cursed, blessed Tree, so bringing His Ransom to 
every man, from all His guilt — '' O Love Divine ! 
O Love excelling ! ' ' And beyond this, behold a 
new gift, the mighty Spirit breathed on men to 
quicken them into spiritual recognition of their 
needs, into apprehension of God, into vision of 
the Christ, till they shall cast themselves at His 
feet, willing captives of this love supreme and 
Divine ! In that surrender they find a Divine 
touch of renewing grace for the very soul and 



124 Reason and Faith 

rise up into passions of holiness, gratitude and 
responsive love to Him who hath so first loved 
them. If there be such a God, who hath '^so 
loved,'' and if I believe it, is it not monstrous in 
me to fail of a grateful and most tender and loyal 
and matchless love for Him ? Do I say, '' Why, 
He is so great that He can not care for my love 
or my personal attitude towards Him, anyway '' ? 
Strange reasoning that ! What He wants in us 
His children is character. What character is that 
which bears no loving gratitude for infinite favors, 
undeserved, amazing and redemptive and at awful 
cost? Such character were less than human, 
worse than brutal. One saying that, forgets that 
love loves love. The greater the love, the greater 
its love for love. The love of God makes infinite 
claim for love returned. That return of love for 
love satisfies the heart of our God as no sacrifice 
or service besides can do. That return of the 
human love for the love Divine is not only the 
proof of the new heart of the great Redemption, 
but is the way of its greatness. This power to 
love the holy and the beautiful, the God and 
His Christ, is itself holiness and beauty. When 
that love comes to absorb and command us, then 
dull duty and heavy obligation cease to press, 
and sweet liberty in the chosen holiness is life 
and life more abundant. We have entered, so, 
the life and likeness of the Christ. We are making 
fast for the * ' Perfect Manhood ' ' which is the 
goal for us of the ' ^ Mighty Love ' ' 

Now the logical sequence of an intellectual be- 



Reason and Faith 125 

lief in a God such as our God seems to us, is, in- 
disputably, the mandate of the Greatest Master of 
morals, the conclusion of reason, and the final 
word of the theistic conscience, *'Thou SHALT 
love the Lord, thy God, with all thine heart 
and all thy mind and all thy soul and all thy 
strength" ! Thou shalt ! Now I say again, I 
have made no frantic or fanatical appeal. I have 
carefully abstained from the effort to stir your 
emotions in this or any one of the addresses of 
this series. It has been a cool appeal to fair 
reason and to nothing else. In this discourse I 
have done nothing but say that if you at all 
believe in the God in whom we do all believe, 
you are solemnly bound by sound reason, real 
sanity, to submit yourselves with all you have 
and are, or hope to have and be, to Him as His 
own and not your own ; to render to Him every 
obedience and active service which He requires 
of any obedient soul, and that you do all this 
in the liberty and with the gladness of an over- 
coming love. The facts of the case, as we hold 
them, demand all this. No man, woman, or 
child can be acquitted of the most grievous sin, 
before the bar of his own reason, judgment, or 
conscience unless he be in that attitude. If he 
plead some inability, I point him to the great 
source of all ability in this matter. He has but 
to lay his disabled heart into the hands of One 
mighty to renew and make it able. He shall get, 
so, a New Heart. His plea of inability will avail 
him naught. His only plea for neglect or post- 



126 Reason and Faith 

ponement will be that of unwillingness, which is 
but confession of his voluntary guilt and most 
irrational behavior. The true, reasonable course 
is clear as the day. The time to take it is now ! 
lyCt REASON, at last, have way. 



Reason and Faith 127 



CHAPTER IX 

THE UNITY OF CHRIST'S PEOPI.E 

That they may be one, even as ue are one. — Jesus The Christ. 

Critics, scoflfers, disbelievers, superficial ob- 

ser\'ers, and Romanists are wont to oxy out upon 
the diversities of name, order, and faith amongst 
the Evangelical Sects. At first glance there 
seems reason. The last census gives us about 
one hundred and twenty-five Christian denomina- 
tions in this republic I We have thirteen st^'les 
of Methodist, thirteen of Baptist, sixteen of 
Lutheran, twelve of Presbyterian, and so on. 
Endless schism and division, it seems. The 
Papacy stands proud of its seamless robe ; scofiers 
cr\' on us and we are put on the defensive. ''Out 
of the one Book of infallible truth, lo, how man}^ 
faiths ! " ' ^ If God did indeed give man a revela- 
tion of Himself and the way of a sinner's salva- 
tion, it ought to be definite and comprehensible 
b}^ all men and in the same sense." ''How can 
you wonder that we refuse to credit your Book, 
when you devout believers interpret it in so con- 
trar}^ ways and are in endless dispute about it 
among yourselves ? " So the question runs. 

Well, then, let it be frankly said that denomina- 
tions have split and multiplied beyond good reason 



128 Reason and Faith 

and, sometimes, quite beyond good temper. There 
is now no good reason for twelve kinds of Pres- 
byterians in this country. There are no corre- 
sponding divergencies of faith. The church was 
broken into North and South by the civil war. 
That is over and its issues settled. The Scotch 
Presbyterians were broken by great historic crises 
in their own land, largely over questions of church 
and state. Their divergencies are chiefly tradi- 
tional now. The Dutch Reformed abide by the 
traditions of their origin, or, if there be still reason 
for their separation from the larger body of Pres- 
byterianism, it lies in their large church endow- 
ments which might be imperilled by merging into 
another ecclesiastical organism. The Baptists 
and Methodists are broken into their fragments 
chiefly by traditional prejudices and variant em- 
phases on ecclesiastical methods, without serious 
divergencies on essential points of doctrinal belief. 
All these minor subdivisions in each great denom- 
ination might well be — ought to be — merged. That 
would be vastly to the advantage of the kingdom 
of Christ and the prosperity of the churches. One 
group of Presbyterians, for example, will sing 
nothing but the Psalms of David. Another will 
not use any musical instrument except the human 
voice in their service of praise. Another will not 
vote or take civil ofiice, or fellowship those who 
do it, till the state, in its constitution, writes God 
and His Christ the supreme Ruler of the nation, 
and so on. The passing of the Confederacy, sole 
cause of the breach, leaves yet the Northern and 



Reason and Faith 129 

Southern Presbyterians separate. May that schism 
soon be healed ! 

The thing, however, to be noted is that all these 
branches of the denominations hold substantially 
the same doctrinal positions ; are separated on 
questions that have nothing to do with the great 
features of the Gospel. They are all equally 
Evangelical, It would make large saving of 
machinery, labor, and cost should we consolidate 
all these petty divisions into grand and solid 
unities under the common denominational name. 
lyCt us find the "common denominator^'! 

Now we come to the larger question of the de- 
nominations themselves. The first thing to be 
said is that all the denominations called Evangel- 
ical agree absolutely as to the essential and funda- 
mental teachings of the Word of God and as to 
what are those fundamentals. Their divergencies 
are along lines of confessed non-essentials. Each 
admits that the others hold all that is essential to 
salvation, sanctification and effective service. They 
diverge on questions of mode, as for immersion as 
the mode of Baptism which separates the Baptist 
from the great mass of the Christian world. The 
Congregationalist differs from his twin brother 
the Presbyterian only in his preference for what 
he esteems a more free and democratic autonomy 
of the individual church. The Episcopalian holds 
to the ' ' Historic Episcopate ' ' for his differentia- 
tion from other protestantism. The Methodist 
wants for government an elective Bishopric, which 
is but a general superintendency of the churches. 



130 Reasofi and Faith 

It is perfectly correct to say that the divisions of 
the Evangelical Christian world into denomina- 
tions are not due to differing interpretations of 
God's revelation of Himself or of His plan of sal- 
vation. Nor are they commonly due to even 
differences of emphasis as to the relative import- 
ance of these doctrines derived from the great 
Book. As between the Calvinist and Arminian 
it is such a difference of emphasis on the Divine 
and human sovereignties, without the denial of 
either, which separates them. The Methodist 
prays Calvinism with all his might, while the 
Presbyterian preaches and works free-will and 
responsibility with an equal energy. All Evan- 
gelicals stand firm with one foot on each of these 
two grand phases of revealed truth. 

The real reason for so many organizations of 
believers in the Divine Word and the Divine 
Christ must be sought elsewhere than in the 
divergence of consent to any of the cardinal 
doctrines of grace. All evangelicals alike hold to 
God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, — three 
persons in the one God ; the miraculous concep- 
tion and birth of our Incarnate Lord ; His sacri- 
ficial death in atonement for our sins ; His 
resurrection, ascension and enthronement in glory 
and His second coming to restore all things in a 
redeemed earth. They all alike believe that 
man was created in innocency, that he fell from 
that estate into sin, the consequent sinfulness of 
all the race, and the ruin which has come of 
it ; in his inability to save himself, but in a full 



Reason and Faith 131 

and free salvation in Jesus Christ through repent- 
ance, regeneration and forgiveness by faith ; in 
the resurrection of the dead and everlasting life 
in the world to come for all true believers. These 
are the essentials of revelation, and to them all 
we assent unhesitantly under whatever denomi- 
national banners we may be mustered. 

When now we come to inferences from the 
Word and to historic conclusions in regard to 
forms of church government and the like, arrivals 
are divergent. Some judge that the New Testa- 
ment indicates a primitive church under the rule 
of teaching and preaching Elders, the latter being 
the primitive Bishops. Others reckon that it 
rather presupposes a democratic-congregational 
order ; others that it provides a full-fledged Dio- 
cesan Bishopric ; others that it starts at once in 
a Papacy under the domination of Peter the 
Primate and the Vicegerent of Christ Himself. 
So the Christian world divides itself on these 
confessedly secondary and non-essential things, 
mainly matters of inference and questions of his- 
tory, on which men may diverge without the 
least failure of faith in or supreme loyalty to the 
Word. These divisions multiply, as I have said, 
on occasion of questions still more remote from 
these grand essentials in which all are one. 

Then come matters of ritual, remoter still. 
Some are so constituted that they love best to 
worship in set forms of stately order regularly 
recurring through all the years, written into 
books of form, linking together the worships of 



132 Reasofi and Faith 

the old ages with the present, and yet to carry 
the reverence, loyalties and praises of generations 
now unborn. They want the habitual in which 
they can suffer no surprises, no lapses from good 
taste nor much of bending to current circum- 
stance. They want little of the bursting in of 
momentary enthusiasms in their service. They 
love to give way to the esthetic in worship and 
so surround it with stately architecture — cathe- 
dral columns, arches, nave and transept, aisle, 
choir and altar. They array their worship in 
majestic music, their ministrants in gorgeous 
symbolic vestments with pomp of ceremonial. So 
come the Ritualistic churches, holding yet the 
like precious faith with all Protestantism. Others 
love the wholly extemporized service with full 
liberty to vent the fervid passions and enthusiasms 
of the hour and of their great salvation in 
''amens" and "hallelujahs" and ''glory to 
God" in the midst of the most solemn acts of 
prayer and adoration. Others of stiller sort, 
while they want the extemporaneous, yet when 
they feel most deeply are the most profoundly 
hushed into silence before God, can not bear to 
have that stillness of soul broken by any outward 
demonstration. They want their worship direc- 
ted and inspired by intelligent display of the 
Divine truth, and so emphasize preaching, — 
Gospel teaching, — as center and spring of wor- 
ship. So all harmless and normal tastes, tradi- 
tions, forms and grades of culture demand and 
find their satisfaction, their advantage, in the 



Reason and Faith 133 

various modes of sincere worship somewhere in 
the range of the denominations, all equally loyal 
to the essential verities of evangelical Christian 
faith. The Methodist goes the straighter, swifter 
and more exultingly to heaven, shouting, sing- 
ing, and with observation, for his free ways. The 
man of form and ritual goes the more serenely, 
with the greater dignity and certainty, home to 
his glory by way of the prayer-book and cathe- 
dral, led by his bishop in gorgeous robe with 
gilded crosier. Let him go thither in full confi- 
dence of his apostolic succession ! We will go in 
the quiet and reverent stillness of our Presbyter- 
ian formlessness and extemporaneous prayer, un- 
hampered by extended ritual, finding profit and 
delight in our more emphasized side of instruction, 
inspiration and edification, which comes of the 
larger importance of the sermon in the service of 
God's house. So we love to worship in audito- 
riums rather than in the vast cathedral spaces, 
where worship, if followed at all, must be fol- 
lowed by aid of a book, and where scenic effects 
are apt to take the place of our appeals to a reas- 
oned faith. 

Advantage, then, or disadvantage of an organic 
unity of Christendom, for which so many are in 
these days so earnestly contending, as if the prayer 
of our Lord that ' ' they all may be one ' ' meant 
that ? With such unity, they say, all the agencies 
for the world's redemption might be consolidated 
into one irresistible supremely effective and world- 
embracing system, saving an immense amount in 



134 Reason and Faith 

men and money now wasted on needless and costly 
machineries of the one hundred and fifty different 
churches. Grant that that might be true. 

Then there would be no waste of energy by inter- 
ference of various agencies in a given field. One 
little village, able to support one church, would 
not be cursed with a half dozen weak, warring 
rival organizations in Christ's name, to the scan- 
dal of the Gospel — which may be true. 

Then the one church, under the one control, 
could concentrate all the enterprises for man's 
uplifting into one intelligent and consistent plan 
and bend all the energies of Christendom, along 
straight lines to that end, which, again, might 
be true. 

Then they urge that the great object of our 
lyOrd's Prayer, namely, ''that men might be- 
lieve, ' ' would be accomplished. Seeing the Chris- 
tian world in solid unity, unbelievers would be 
overwhelmed with the conviction of the verity of 
the faith which had wrought so solid a consent 
of the rational world and embodied it in so mas- 
sive a unit. The Devil — your enemy — can stand 
the irregular assaults of one hundred petty skir- 
mishing parties, but would quail before the mighty 
on-coming of solid Christendom in arms for the 
kingdom — which might perhaps be. 

Well, then, am I an enthusiast for such organic 
unity ? Far from it, at present or in any near 
future. I do not believe that such a vast consol- 
idation of all Christendom into one organization, 
with one creed and ritual, would so readily win or 



Reason and Faith 135 

so well serve and hold all the variant tastes, tra- 
ditions, cultures and constitutions of mankind, as 
can and do these various organizations in the 
Christ's name. As things are there is some creed, 
some form of worship, some ideal of service, which 
is suited to every class, type, and condition of 
humanity, which appeals to and is likely to win, 
as no regimen of any one church whatever could 
do. My taste does not suit another's, nor does 
the other's mine. My intellectual, social, moral 
and spiritual nature is better served by the 
order of one church than it could be by that of 
another, but that does not settle the matter for 
the other. The many men of many minds will 
be best served in Christ by the many churches of 
many kinds. It is therefore that in Divine Provi- 
dence these many denominations have come to be 
and to be each one so richly owned and blest of 
God. They have not been a providential mistake. 
They have not labored under God's curse. They 
have been established and built up with prayers 
and serious convictions and under Divine guid- 
ance ; have stood, each one for something that 
needed emphasis, or at any rate liberty, and have 
done great work for God and man. 

Then much, very much, is to be said of the 
development of energy, zeal and enthusiasm in 
each of these bodies living and working alongside 
each other. We are not perfect yet. Rivalries 
are not an unmixed evil. Three small churches, 
which can neither of them live easily, will be far 
more likely to do large work for a town or region 



136 Reason a?id Faith 

than one big one which is rich and strong enough 
to get on without special effort. Each of the 
three little ones has to work to live, and there is 
laziness enough in spiritual as in temporal things, 
to tempt a getting on with as little effort as may 
be. Suppose that, in this city, there were but one 
denomination of Christians. It would be big and 
rich and in need of nothing. It would set its 
type of observance, life and service. It would 
grow proud, careless and corrupt or at least con- 
tent. Now, with so many distinct denominations 
on the ground, each is on its guard and good be- 
havior. Each must be active to hold its own and 
win new adherents. Each must keep itself pure, 
alert, and Christly or it will suffer. None can 
lapse far from the standards of the Christ in the 
midst of so many which are standing for the same 
Master. Not only is this true in the home lands 
but abroad. The zeal, sacrifice, heroism and suc- 
cess of one church in one great field of the heathen 
world fires the hearts of all to a holy rivalry for 
the salvation of men which is hastening on the 
day of the world's redemption. Look back to the 
times when one vast, rich and powerful ecclesias- 
ticism reigned over the civilized world. It grew 
corrupt, infamous, tyranous and intolerable, till 
to save the very fundamentals of religion its 
sole supremacy must be overthrown. That over- 
throw was the salvation of the Roman Catholic 
Church itself, as well as of this modern time. The 
sole church of any state or nation soon becomes 
the state church, which is in its very ideal an in- 



Reason a?id Faith 137 

justice and oppression, and in practice lets into 
the sanctuaries of religion all the corruptions of 
the state on which it depends. Such a church 
tends as resistlessly as gravitation to the crushing 
out of free thought and the compulsion of the 
conscience. Acts of conformity, with the Inqui- 
sition to back them, are the logic of the one church, 
a visible, organic and portentous unity. In no 
land to-day which one sole church dominates is 
that church pure or even decent, or the bodies, 
properties, souls or thoughts of men free. The 
one church assumes to control the present govern- 
ments, societies, homes and lives of men, and to 
wield the awful sanctions of eternit}^ for enforce- 
ment of the outrages of time. The nearer such a 
sole church of a nation or race should come to 
complete success, that is to the unquestioning 
allegiance of the entire people, the more awful 
would be its baleful power. The universal sway 
of one ecclesiastical system, unquestioned and 
without a rival, would mean the enslavement of 
the race and the wreck of the Gospel ; would be, 
in the present default of human perfection, more 
to be feared than any other conceivable calamity. 
It may do, possibly, in the Millenium but not now. 
But how shall men know what to believe in 
this diversity of the sects ? Believe ? Wh}^, believe 
what they all hold in common, if you must believe 
by direction of others and not by 3^our own investi- 
gations. That central plexus of doctrine stands 
out clear, rings out in all the confessions. The 
diversity of sects which hold that is but the fullest 



138 Reason and Faith 

possible evidence that that is the teaching of the 
Word. If everybody, from every point of view, 
differing in everything else, is at one with every- 
body else on these points, then they must be the 
essential Christian teaching. No one church of 
the organic unity could bear so irrefragable a tes- 
timony to the essentials of Bible truth. It is es- 
tablished, not by the mouth of one witness but of 
a hundred and fifty denominations of Christians 
from as many different points of view, and diverg- 
ing in their conclusions freely except on these 
grand central things. What testimony so tre- 
mendous as that could be conceived ? Each of 
these divergent sects converging and at one on 
these central truths, holding these contents of the 
faith precisely alike, is a witness of independent 
weight as to the veritable teaching of the Holy 
Word. Those things which have been ''every- 
where and always believed by all ' ' must be Bible 
doctrine. No man can be at sea as to those essen- 
tials if he have any desire for harbor ! 

Nor is there now any expenditure of zeal and 
energy in quarrels of the sects. We are not war- 
ring with each other. There is more of strife 
between the Low, Broad, and High in the English 
State Church, or between different elements in 
the Roman Catholic Church, than between all the 
Evangelical denominations of the world to-day. 
The rivalries here are but the blessed emulations 
of various regiments, divisions, and corps of the 
one grand army of our King. We are trying 
which can run the fastest and farthest to reach 



Reason and Faith 139 

the souls of men ; whicli can fight the toughest 
battles against the Devil ; which can give most, 
do most, suflFer most for Jesus and His Kingdom. 
We do not hate, mistrust, baflfle and thwart each 
other. Each presses on in its own field and line, 
crying ' ' God speed ! Make haste ! ' ' to every other; 
and each, for every other, is going faster and 
farther and fighting better and achieving the 
more grandly. The Rough Riders at San Juan 
Hill cry to the Tenth Regiment, '^Come on ! '' 
and the Tenth Regiment shouts back, " Here we 
are with you ! See who will get there first ! ' ' 
So they win. 

The unity for which the Redeemer prayed, — 
a perfect unity of spirit, of love and of great co- 
work, — is well nigh come, is gloriously visible 
amongst all the divisions of the Protestant Evan- 
gelical host. Only the non-evangelical, the 
Romanist and the caviler see a hostile and con- 
flicting host on this side. We have and will have 
none of it. We have field enough and work 
enough without strife within ourselves. 

Organic unity ? Impossible ! For the only 
proposition of it so far, is on terms that we all 
turn back to the bosom of the old Mother Church 
of Rome, or run flocking into the circumscribed 
spaces of a church which in the United States 
counts but six hundred thousand members to our 
eighteen millions, into the narrow communion of 
the only Protestant Church which unchurches us 
all, bars our pastors from its pulpits, denies the 
validity of our ordinances and Sacraments and 



140 Reason and Faith 

turns us over to the ' ' uncovenanted mercies of 
God!" It offers such unity, not on the great 
essentials of the Gospel, but on acceptance of the 
Historic Episcopate, that is on the basis not of 
revelation but of tradition and studies in history 
whose conclusions are disputed by the learning 
and piety of the greater part of the Protestant 
world. Organic unity can only come, if at all, 
ought only to come ever, on the basis of the cen- 
tral and essential things of the clear revelation of 
God. 

Organic unity ? Impossible on any, at present, 
visible terms ! And undesirable under any present 
conditions ! Vastly perilous, for this age, were it 
possible ! It is not that unity for which Our Lord 
was praying in His wonderful intercession. The 
unity for which He longed and for which the 
Christian world is seeking is not one of form but 
of spirit, and can not, assuredly, be forwarded by 
seeking to impose as its condition an ungrounded 
inference of men for the Oracles of God. Least 
of all can it be hoped for on condition of universal 
assent to a historic proposition which the vast 
majority of students of history utterly deny. 



Reason and Faith 141 



CHAPTER X 

THK WAY OF CERTITUDE. 

If any man will do the Father^ s will he shall know the doctrine. 

— Jesus, the Christ. 

Doing the will, then, is the way to clear light 
of truth. Knowledge here is not complete ; yet 
definite, comprehensive knowledge is desirable 
and sufficiently practicable. The Master is tell- 
ing us the way to get it. Not study, reflection, 
investigation, but something else ; viz., practical 
application of the thing that is already clear. 
You are to yield yourself in actual obedience to 
the truth you already have in any line in order to 
get more of it. So pursuing, you will get that 
''more." Our modern philosophers are telling 
us just now that most of our confident beliefs are 
reached not at all by simple process of reason. 
They are just beginning, nineteen centuries be- 
lated, to catch up with Jesus. 

If you are at work in chemistry you must use 
the chemical laws you know, and by experiment 
come to progress. In mathematics use all you 
have mastered in order to reach the higher walks 
among the stars. You cannot use multiplication 
and division until you have mastered addition 



142 Reason and Faith 

and subtraction. The text is little else than say- 
ing that you must avail of the first rung of the 
ladder in order to reach the higher. To get your 
cherries from the top branches of the tree you 
must climb the trunk. To make progress in 
truth you must use what you know, must mean 
real business, have a practical aim, be not a mere 
dilettante, playing with it. That of all lines of 
truth is general law. But as you come up to the 
realm of truth that is great, more vital than math- 
ematics and chemistry — to the kinds of truth 
which lay hold on the moral and spiritual in man 
and the universe, whose issues are of infinite and 
immortal concern, there can be no safe trifling. 
Dilettantism — playing with truth up here — is 
moral depravity. Every truth up here is a moral 
imperative. To know here and not to do is sin, 
disloyalty, ruin. Down there in the chemistries 
you may know mainly in the interest of knowing, 
with no purpose of practical use ; but up here in 
the domain of conscience, to know is to come 
under the supreme obligation, the absolute neces- 
sity. Each truth is the maundement of God. 
Not one is to be sought fairly or held guiltlessly 
in the mere interest of knowing it. Not one can 
be harmlessly stored away unused. Now and 
here, then, there can be no intellectual candor in 
quest of truth unless there be readiness to apply 
that already known. Of course, if one will not 
conform to the truth he has he is reluctant to 
admit more, which being known, will only fling 
him into more glaring inconsistency and more 



Reason and Faith 143 

flagrant guilt. No, he who will not square 
character and conduct to the moral and spiritual 
truth he holds, can not be a candid seeker for 
more truth, he may be false to it. His whole 
purpose will be to get rid of what he has because 
it stings and goads him as guilty. He does not 
want anything further in that line. 

I cannot resist the conviction that the secret of 
much of the skepticism which men boast — of 
all which they boast — concerning religious truth, 
lies right here. This truth requires holiness of 
heart, rectitude in life, supreme service of God, 
and continual effort for redemption of men . The 
average man is averse to all that, and therefore, 
by all the energy of the evil in him will not admit 
the truth of divine revelation or the verity of the 
divine requirement. Skepticism is oftenest not 
the outcome of serious and candid inquiry, but of 
the uncandid attitude which will not obey the 
truth it knows and so determines to deny it and 
admit no more. Candor reigns only in the soul 
which is obedient to truth so far as it has found 
it, and candor is essential to attainment of truth. 

Of course I am not speaking of the solemn 
doubts of men like Romanes, who lived long 
enough to recall his former unbelief and re-enter 
the church of his childhood's communion, and 
who declares out of the depths, "I am not 
ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation 
of God the universe has lost to me its soul of love- 
liness. When at times I think, as at times I 
must, of the appalling contrast between the hal- 



144 Reason and Faith 

lowed creed that once was mine and the lonely 
mystery of existence as I now find it, I shall ever 
find it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of 
which my nature is susceptible. ' ' Whose heart 
has not been touched with the like wail of Pro- 
fessor Clifford, as he sailed away from England to 
his death, too early to get back to the old moor- 
ings of faith from which Professor Romanes 
launched to his glory in the serenities of a Christ- 
ian peace. 

That sort of unbelieving we must respect and 
stand in awe of. But that is not the common 
type. It has candor and is now swinging back, 
through all the realms of science and philosophy, 
to the old land marks of at least theistic 
believing. 

Now, further, somebody down here is com- 
plaining that all spiritual truth is not made clear. 
It ought to stand out definite and indubitable, 
they say. I say, no. What good if it did ? Men 
would not obey it. It is a mercy of God that He 
does not bolt in on the unwilling soul the whole 
bulk of moral and spiritual truth. It would only 
aggravate the guilt and curse of the disobedient. 
If one will not obey the truth he knows, why 
should more of it be thrust on him, that he may 
be false to it ? Time enough for more when he 
uses what he has got. Every man clearly knows 
enough to make a moral test of him, to show 
what his attitude toward righteousness is. Paul 
declares that. It is, so, a vast mercy of God that 
only candor — i. e., the purpose to conform to 



Reason and Faith 145 

known truth — can make thorough mastery of 
moral and spiritual truth. 

Who knows and will not do — many stripes; 
who knows not — few. Who will not do — the less 
he knows the better. 

Further, to do the known will of God — /. e., 
righteousness — is to come into that deepest and 
most indisputable knowledge of experience. The 
man has tried the truth and knows it as it has 
worked in his own case. '' Nobody need talk to 
me now, I 've tried it and know." Coleridge 
was asked once, ' ' How can I know that the Gos- 
pel is true ? ' ' That keenest and most brilliant 
of philosophers, and not wont to be chary of words, 
simply answered, ''Try it." Put alongside the 
brilliant Coleridge the old woman whose Bible 
was marked all through '' T " and ''P." Asked 
what that meant she said, '' Why, I come to a 
promise and I try it in prayer and faith and mark 
it *T,' — ' tried.' And when the promise is ful- 
filled to me I mark it ' P,'— ' proved.' " She and 
Coleridge, from the two extremes of the intel- 
lectual realm, are at one. That is it. Put the 
Gospel to the test of experiment. That is the 
way it was meant to be used. It is no curiously 
devised scheme of intellectual subtleties. It is 
not a mere mental gymnasium. It is of value 
only as a practical life scheme. It is a working 
force without one theory or fact of mere specu- 
lative interest. It is a practical force not to be 
grasped by mere intellect, only to be understood 
when felt. It is light which you can know only 



146 Reason and Faith 

by experience, as the blind can never know sun- 
light or color. It is a life which no man can 
know until he lives it ; a warmth none can know 
save by basking in it ; a love none can understand 
but the lover ; a power none can conceive until 
it thrills him — until, using it, he finds its divine 
mightiness ; a joy which only the rejoicing can 
know ; a peace which passeth understanding, save 
of those who sit in its holy enfoldment. The 
peace which Jesus gives His own comes as the 
world gives not, and is of a sort the world knows 
not, nor can break. Now it is the way of nature, 
and of the new nature, that one experience of 
inspiring truth shall kindle passion and create 
power for another and a finer. This vestibule is 
so fair, I must press within the doors of the tem- 
ple. This holy place is so enchanting, I must 
enter with reverent audacity the Holy of Holies 
where God is. One rich experience makes us all- 
athirst for another. So the soul is led on from 
grace to grace and glory to glory, up into the 
same image, up into the very likeness of Christ, 
up into his eternal palaces on high. 

You see now, I think, the doctrine of the text. 
Moral, religious, spiritual truth is all for the 
direction of life, creation of character, practical 
application. Who will not obey and apply what 
he knows of it, will only be damaged — dammed 
more deeply — by having the whole mass of that 
unwelcome truth dumped upon him. He faces 
out toward it in a frame of repugnance to which 
candor is impossible. Belief of it, and of more of 



Reason and Faith 147 

it, would but distress, irritate, and plunge the 
man into deeper guilt. That attitude of spiritual 
repugnance can wholly distort mental operation 
and enable one to wholly discredit spiritual truth, 
and does that to wide and appalling extent ; and, 
finally, the spiritual truths are of such sort as can 
not in the great body of them be really known, 
save by their experience. You must see, then, 
the tremendous force of the words of our lyord. 
He only who doeth the will shall know the 
doctrine. 

But now the text implies that to an extent the 
will and doctrine are known already, written in 
men's hearts so that they may be put on trial, 
proven, and lead on to the fuller apprehension of 
all truth ; that the great test of candor, earnest- 
ness, the moral attitude of the soul may be made. 
Oh, I am not making with you now a plea in 
the interest of any mere speculative. There is like 
to be in every social group an element which, 
while believing certain religious propositions, is 
yet in doubt as to many others, and excuses itself 
from venturing out on the truth it does hold for 
fear of the deeper waters into which it may get 
after a little. It is looking out for consequences 
after it gets beyond the distance it can now see. It 
is afraid to commit itself fully to the truth it holds, 
for dread that it may not find further truth enough 
to live by, or may fail of loyalty to it. It is that 
attitude of many, maybe most of us, to which I 
speak. It is a wide unrest, a half agnostic grop- 
ing in the dark, of our time, in the church as 



148 Reason and Faith 

well as out of it. I would fain help my fellows 
out into rest, light, sure standing. So I say the 
simplest, directest thing that can be said : You are 
somewhere and know something. Begin, then, 
just where you are ; conform character and be- 
havior at once to what you know. That is the 
will of God, that you obey instantly the truth 
you know. That, for the present, is the whole 
will of God for you. Obey that will and lo ! the 
promise — you shall know ! Promise absolute, un- 
conditional. Do that and you shall know. Mental 
law promises that ; the law of moral and spiritual 
truth promises that ; God guarantees it. If you 
fail to obey the truth you know, you wouldn't 
obey any other truth along that line. When you 
use what you have it will be time enough to give 
you more. 

To illustrate. I began once this line of imme- 
diate urgency with a young man, an editor, of 
keen, intellectual furniture and good culture, who 
had lost belief in a personal God, and cast away 
the old wives' fable of a soul. He was in a decline, 
but comfortable and about the house. ' ' I know 
I can't live," he said, ''but when I die, that's 
the end." I set out our Christian thought of the 
soul, and its grand life after the body, as well as 
I could. He could only say listlessly, ' ' It may be, 
but I don' t believe it. " I caught at that ' ' may be ' ' 
and pressed it. "There may be an immortal 
soul, then ? " '' Yes. " " There may be a God, 
then!" ''H'm, possibly." '* He may then know 
us, care for us, help us? " '* Oh, it is possible," 



Reason arid Faith 149 

but listlessly. '' Well, then, it is possible, if you 
and I should ask Him and promise Him to act on 
any truth He might show us, it is possible that 
He would lead us to see things exactly as they 
are ? '' He looked up and said, ''Why, yes, it is 
possible/' Then I said, ''You are an honest, 
candid man ; will you frankly accept and act reas- 
onably on any truth into which you may be led 
in that way ? ' ' He answered unhesitatingly, ' ' Yes, 
indeed." I fell on my knees and prayed thus : 
" O God, if there be any God, show this man his 
soul, if he has one ; give him the fact about immor- 
tality, if there be any ; and about what he must 
do and be, if there is anything that should be 
done, for Christ's sake, if there be any Christ, 
Amen." And he said "Amen," with emphasis. 
' ' That is exactly the prayer for me — the only one 
to which I could have said 'Amen.' " He prom- 
ised me that he would use that prayer himself, 
and would hospitably entertain and act on any 
truth of which he should become convinced. He 
was as good as his word, prayed that prayer sin- 
cerely, but at first without expectation, then more 
earnestly, then incessantly. As his unbelief began 
to melt away, point by point, new truth was reached 
and put to use. It was beautiful, wonderful, inspir- 
ing to see how the lyord led him, until he exulted 
and triumphed in God. 

One midnight, six months later, he called his 
wife, who had been an unbeliever with him, to 
his bedside, and said, "My darling, I am going 
now to Jesus, my Redeemer, and yours. With 



150 Reason and Faith 

the dawn I shall be over there with Him in 
Heaven. You and the children will be here 
alone. God help you ! Will you come on after 
me, and bring the children with you to me up 
there? I shall be watching for you whenever 
you come." She made the sacred promise and 
they sealed it there with a holy kiss, and she kept 
it sacred, and with her children the widow is on 
her way to share with him the glory in which he 
has been dwelling for twenty years. 

Dr. Bushnell was a tutor in Yale College, dur- 
ing a time of great religious interest, and was 
an unbeliever. In unrest himself he was distressed 
lest he might be hindering many young men who 
were prone to follow him. Yet he could not be- 
lieve far enough to help them or even to get out 
of their way. His great and generous heart was 
full of trouble. At last he said, ''There is a dis- 
tinction between right and wrong. That I know. 
I do believe in a God." Then he threw himself 
on his knees, dedicated himself there passionately 
and forever to serve and do the right so far as he 
could see it, and to contend against the wrong for- 
ever, and to seek new light that he might follow 
it. Thenceforward, standing for the right, seek- 
ing of God to know it more perfectly, one doubt 
after another was resolved, truth after truth came 
clear and flaming upon his soul ; he followed it 
unhesitatingly, until he stood through all his 
great and holy manhood a foremost figure in all 
spiritual and intellectual realms for half a century 
of grand and saving work. He totally dedicated 



Reaso7i and Faith 151 

himself to obedience to all the truth he clearly 
knew, grew in it to the insight of a seer, the stat- 
ure of a giant, and the glory of a saint. These 
facts have been published since, but he outlined 
that phase of his early life as we rode together in 
the saddle over the rolling prairies of Minnesota, 
in the first year of my ministry. 

My appeal, then, to all men who are troubled 
and hindered by speculative doubts, — as who is 
not who reads and thinks ? who do not know on 
any wide scale what they believe, — is, '*Give 
yourself, like Bushnell, in an instant surrender to 
the spiritual truth you do know." If you only 
believe there is a God, give yourself to him in 
absolute surrender, soul and body, forever, and 
ask him for further light to truth and duty. If 
you only know a contrast between sin and holi- 
ness, then dedicate yourself utterly to holiness 
and its pursuit, its championship, and you shall 
come to know all. It is step by step, one step at 
a time ; so arrival is made. If you wait to see all 
the way before you begin your march, you will 
never start. God is pressing you toward His 
heavenly kingdom. You don't know about elec- 
tion or effectual calling, or the saint's persever- 
ence ; about the theories of inspiration or atone- 
ment ; haven't given much attention to theology 
anyway ; can't even recite the shorter catechism, 
may be. What of that ? I am sorry about all 
that in a way, but what of it ? Yield your whole 
soul under pressure of the Holy Spirit to God in 
the mighty vow to follow instantly and to the 



152 Reason and Faith 

end all the light you get ; cast yourself on Him 
like a child in the dark, and if there be a God He 
will not let you fall into the abyss. That you 
yield yourself to Him if there be any God must be 
the will of God. Do this will and it is not in the 
nature of things or of God that you should fail to 
know all righteousness as need of the knowledge 
comes. ^' The simple, entire and affectionate sur- 
render of the soul to God, if there be any God, 
must be salvation, ' ' and the all of it. Here let us 
stand together, amidst all the swirl of faiths and 
doubts, stand together secure, however much or 
little of the great system of truth we may chance 
to know. He will not suffer any soul that is 
wholly and lovingly surrendered to Him to stum- 
ble on and perish in the dark. Why should He ? 
He will not fling away any life dedicated to Him 
in faith. How can He ? As God is God He can 
not. 

This, then, is salvation here and now, every- 
where and always — hearty surrender to God. 
^'This do and thou shalt live." This do and 
thou shalt know all doctrine that man needs 
know, and have all power that man needs have, 
and become all that man needs be on earth or in 
heaven. This is salvation, — full salvation, — the 
all of salvation. This? Why this, right here 
and now, for all of us ! Quite as well now as to- 
morrow, here as elsewhere. Quite as well — 
vastly better ! 



Reason and Faith 153 



CHAPTER XI 

REASON AND FAITH. 

Come now and let us reason together^ saith the Lord. — Isaiah. 

The Creator has endued man with reason, not 
for rust but for use. It is in the range of the 
highest faculties, up here with the conscience and 
the spiritual. I^ike the conscience, it is called on 
for service in every free act. Its ofl&ce is to col- 
late the facts set in upon us by the senses, by 
consciousness, by testimony, or from whatever 
source ; to consider their evidence, arrange them 
in their relations, systematize them, and to estimate 
their relative and their absolute importance and 
order all life in accord with its conditions and en- 
vironment. Between pretended and actual fact 
it must be the arbiter. It places before the con- 
science the data for obligation. It passes on and 
authenticates to the spiritual nature the facts of 
the spiritual world for its basis of reality, else the 
spiritual is the degeneracy of superstition pure 
and simple. Just as action in the common, every- 
day life of man without sanction of reason is in- 
sanity, so is action in spiritual or moral realms 
without its sanction insane. John lyocke says, 



154 Reason and Faith 

**lie that takes away reason to make way for 
revelation puts out the light of both." Reason 
must justify, or conscience must condemn, every 
voluntary act. Man dares not exclude reason from 
its high function in any sphere of human interest 
on peril of his manhood — on peril of running 
counter to the decrees of God recorded in every 
department of nature as well as in the written 
Word. 

We have before, in this series of discourses, re- 
flected on the strict reasonableness of the expecta- 
tion that a personal, free, and intelligent God, if 
there be one, interested in and responsible for man, 
will reveal Himself; that he will surely do it if 
man stands, in any way, in need of special knowl- 
edge of Him, His laws, His relations to His 
creatures, or of his own destiny and wise prepara- 
tion for it. We have further seen that it is 
supremely reasonable to believe in such a God ; 
that such a belief is, indeed, the only fairly work- 
able hypothesis in any field of science, philosophy 
or morals. It is, therefore, the natural conclusion 
of sound reason that there must be, somewhere, 
such a revelation of these greatest matters of 
human concern. If there be such a revelation 
extant it is unquestionably in this Book. There 
is none other which, to the reason of mankind, 
has show of like august claim. This has justified 
its claim by inexorable proofs, not only through 
investigation of its evidences internal and external, 
but by actual experiment of its power in the up- 
lift of individual men and in the glory of the na- 



Reason and Faith 155 

tions which have embraced it and sought approx- 
imately to apply its sublime law. 

Now, by the very hypothesis of the need and 
the reasonable expectation of such a Divine rev- 
elation, it is to be anticipated that, when it comes, 
it will contain much of vital truth which the 
reason unaided could never have reached. Such 
content alone can justify revelation to reason. It 
were strange conceit in man to suppose that he, 
so infinitesimal a part of this universe, could make 
for himself mastery of all that he needs to know 
of it ; or to imagine that he can completely under- 
stand all that is clearly revealed. Revelation is 
of the Infinite which only the Infinite can fully 
comprehend. No finite intelligence may imagine 
that it can, or ought to, wholly comprehend all 
that is revealed. Any one of us would need a 
good deal of study to understand the mechanism 
of an intricate loom for weaving the elaborate 
pattern of a silken ribbon. Keenest intellects have 
searched for ages the secrets of the visible universe, 
and none has found the last word of revealing na- 
ture along the lines of his little ' ' closed sphere ' ' 
of investigation. The universe is vaster than its 
material side. Its spiritual basis is incapable of 
investigation by scientific ' ' instruments of pre- 
cision ' ' or mathematical formulae. We can not 
master it by the senses. We have not ranged 
through and learned it by experience. Only on 
the narrowest verges of it are we yet hovering. 
To its depths and lengths and heights we have 
not penetrated. It hath not entered the heart of 



156 Reason and Faith 

man to conceive the fulness of that vast unex- 
plored. Were it all laid out before us I suppose 
that its terms would be so outside our experience 
that it would still be incomprehensible to us. 
Only when we ourselves shall have entered those 
infinite invisibilities and become of their awful 
order shall we begin fairly to comprehend them. 
That is fair conclusion of pure reason. That is 
not to discard reason nor to slur it, but to use it 
with supreme freedom and just appreciation. 

Yonder man who will believe nothing which he 
does not understand ? A lecturer once announced 
that he was to speak in a certain hall on the 
proposition that you should ' ' believe nothing 
that you can't understand." An old farmer met 
him and asked, ' ' Are you the man who is going 
to lecture over at the hall to-night?" "Yes, 
sir ; I am." '" What is it you are going to talk 
about?" He told him. "Now, that's curious, 
isn't it? I've been a good deal puzzled about 
one thing. That is my pasture over there. I 
suppose that you can tell me how it is that those 
colts eat the grass and it comes out hair all over 
them, and the sheep eat the grass and it comes 
out wool, and the pigs eat it and it comes out 
bristles, and the geese eat it and it comes out 
feathers. That bothers me, and I'm mighty glad 
to find a man that can tell me all about it. 
Can't? Why, don't you believe it? I tell 
you it's just so. Can't ? Well, I reckon I won't 
go to the lecture, then, if you are stumped by 
such a little thing as that ! " 



Reason and Faith 157 

Yet on these vast matters of God's revelations 
of Himself and of the invisible and spiritual 
universe men are saying that it is unreasonable 
to believe anything that you can not understand ! 
Such ajQ&rmation is the acme of unreason. No 
man, thinking, would accept as a revelation from 
God that which contained nothing to transcend 
the powers of the mere unaided human under- 
standing. By that token you would affirm it the 
work of man, and as a revelation worthless and 
needless. Man needs revelation from God only 
to make known to him things which he ought to 
know, but which are so far above him as to be 
out of his unaided reach, — so beyond him that 
they will be dim with mystery, — relations of so 
super-sensuous sort that it is impossible that he 
should yet altogether comprehend them. We 
need from revelation such propositions in regard 
to sin and its penalties and redemption from it as 
none but God could make — such as in motive, in 
process and in their nature, to be beyond the 
scope or authority of reason. Till we are as 
great as God He will be the august mystery of 
mysteries as He is the holy of holies and the in- 
finite of infinitudes. His sufficiently, yet parti- 
ally, unveiled truth will stretch away into the 
fathomless and the insoluble mysteries for joy of 
unravelling to all eternity. O thou speck, thou 
flitting mote of an instant's tarrying on the outer 
rim of a minute section of this little wheel — the 
earth — who can not comprehend even that, will 
you, such and standing so, looking off" into the 



158 Reason and Faith 

tremendous machineries of an illimitable, spiritual 
infinitude, lift up your hand in the face of God 
revealing, to swear that you will believe only 
what you understand ? That were ineffable con- 
tempt of reason ! That were blasphemy of com- 
mon sense ! Reason itself demands of revelation 
what is beyond itself. 

As to what is contrary to reason ; a very differ- 
ent thing from that which is beyond reason. 
Reason is given to guide all action and to estab- 
lish all faith. Its highest function — its supreme 
responsibility — is to weigh the grounds of our 
most momentous actions and most solemn beliefs. 
I can never persuade myself that the great Author 
of reason, — essence and source of all truth, as of 
all things, — has cut away from the ofi&ces of rea- 
son the majestic realms of the spiritual, which 
must command the most important activities and 
vital problems of man here and of his destinies 
hereafter. These are the exact themes fittest for 
the exercise and most effective development of 
his loftiest powers. They stir the profoundest 
rational interest and make most directly for gran- 
deur of reason. Through the rational faculties, 
too, they make most mightily for the evolution 
of the moral and spiritual in the race. It is in- 
credible that these inspiring ranges of loftiest 
truth in regard to which all men must act should 
lie outside the field of reason. It is not true, rea- 
son is not ruled out by revelation. You may, you 
must, be required to believe much which reason 
could not have discovered for itself ; but you are 



Reason and Faith 159 

not required to believe anything that is contrary 
to reason. You are never in religion to act irra- 
tionally, that is, without or contrary to reason. 
That were sheer madness and mockery of God ! 

''Yet," you say, ''Yet we must accept re- 
vealed things which quite transcend the powers 
of unaided reason." Surely. Revelation from 
God, if of any use at all, will contain such truth. 
What, then, is the function of reason in regard to 
it ? This, to discover whether there be reason- 
able ground for accepting the supposed revelation 
as truly from God — that is, as a genuine thing. 
Having made that investigation and settled it 
that its claim is justified, reason demands accept- 
ance of the contents of the revelation. This accept- 
ance by the reason is intellectual faith, correctly 
called a "rational faith." It is, so far, precisely 
like your belief in the reports which you receive 
on the authority of those who know, about lands, 
peoples, and customs of parts of the world of which 
you have had no experience. It is precisely as 
reasonable as your belief, on the authority of the 
astronomer, in the coming of an eclipse which 
you could not at all calculate for yourself. Ra- 
tional faith in the revealed facts of religion is 
exactly like your intellectual acceptance of the 
obscure facts of well-attested science on the au- 
thority of experts. We everywhere do and must 
plant absolute and controlling faiths on authority, 
— faiths concerning things which we never have 
and never could have discovered or even investi- 
gated for ourselves. In accepting and acting con- 



i6o Reason and Faith 

fidently on these innumerable beliefs, we are act- 
ing in accord with the most imperative dictates of 
highest reason. These faiths established on au- 
thority are the vast majority of all the practical 
believings of mankind and are of such sort that 
life on earth would be impossible but for their 
holding. These things surely believed may have 
appeared in a high degree opposite to all antece- 
dent probability, as once seemed all the now dem- 
onstrated facts of astronomy or even the sphericity 
of the earth itself. It is reasonable to accept these 
facts on authority. Neither you nor I have dem- 
onstrated them, but we do not scoff at each other 
for believing them. The improbable becomes 
rational when it is proven ! It is no more con- 
trary to reason, for it is fact. 

Now if you compare the conclusions from a 
mere human authority with the authentication of 
a Word of God, when you have rationally settled 
it that you have a Word of God, what does reason 
say? Why, surely, that human ''demonstrations^* 
have contradicted and reversed themselves in tens 
of thousands of instances ; that to-day is forever 
reversing yesterday as yesterday did the day be- 
fore ; that man is fallible ; that his pronunciations 
are not always reliable ; that he is capable of pre- 
judgments which wholly warp his candor ; that 
he is not always honest ; that he is capable of 
being deceived and even of deceiving others delib- 
erately. The best of human authorities it is wise 
to question and cross-question often, especially 
when they venture into realms outside the mere 



Reason and Faith i6i 

physical, material and mathematical sciences. The 
most dangerous phase of science is that which 
deems itself omni-science ! But if reason has set- 
tled it that we have an authentic Word of God in 
Revelation, then reason says : ' ' Believe, believe 
implicitly. The God knows. He can not be 
mistaken and He can not lie. He alone can, to a 
certainty, know these out-of-sight and out-of- 
hearing things about which we need most of all 
to be assured. Hear Him and heed. Only be 
careful of right interpreting ! " That is the voice 
of sound reason. If there be anything there 
which seems antecedently improbable, why then it 
seemed so to the King of Siam that water should 
ever be so solid that men could walk on it or to the 
ancient world that the earth should be revolving 
at such an incredible speed on its axis, or that 
there could be inhabitants at the Antipodes, 
clinging to the surface, head-downwards, for their 
lives. Of course there will be before-hand im- 
probabilities in a revelation of such beings, worlds, 
destinies as these with which the great Revelation 
must deal. But in it there will be, can be, nothing 
which is contrary to reason — for there can be in it 
nothing which is not true. 

There may be in it things which reason, in its 
present limitations of knowledge, can not reconcile 
with each other. We ought to calculate on that 
if we rationally consider our littleness and the 
narrow reach of our vision. But if anything there 
seems absolutely opposite to reason, we must be- 
lieve that we have thus far misinterpreted the rev- 



1 62 Reason and Faith 

elation itself, or that it has crept in there by some 
human copyist's or translater's fault. Contradic- 
tion to reason can not be in the genuine revelation 
of Himself, by Himself to man. God is the su- 
preme Reason and has made us in His image. He 
is the supreme Truth and can give us only truth. 
Highest reason bids us believe implicitly what 
reason declares has come from God. 

Reason's work, then, is to establish the fact of 
a Divine Revelation, the verity, the nature, the 
extent of the Divine inspiration in it ; the genuine- 
ness of the documents which convey it ; to fix the 
Divine intent of it ; to settle whether this section — 
say the book of Job — be merely biographic narra- 
tive or a sublime religious drama ; whether that 
be a story of actual life or a sweet religious idyll 
of the ancient time, or a holy allegory of penitence 
and eflFective obedience ; whether this book or 
song does really belong to the record of revelation 
or not ; to clear the whole question of obscurity 
and incertitude ; to relieve its difficulties so far as 
may be ; to point the reasonable way of solving 
its seeming inconsistencies ; to fairl}^ interpret it, 
and then to command faith in it. Reason and 
scholarship surely have here business enough in 
hand, and must be allowed their full liberties of 
most exhaustive investigation. To deny them 
their legitimate functions here amongst the 
foundations of faith were to bar them from their 
highest use — their chief design ; were to sweep 
away the very basis of a rational believing ; to 
make faith itself a mere and an idle superstition. 



Reason and Faith 163 

Freest range and widest liberty for the intelligence 
of man in the exploration of these loftiest themes 
in the finest fields for its development and grand- 
est realms of its spiritual exercise is reason's just 
demand. Happily, prohibition of such investiga- 
tion can no longer be enforced on men. Reason 
will ever find here its most enchanting, inspiring, 
and fruitful field — win its most brilliant successes 
and grow to its most stalwart grandeur ; while 
faith will come, through its investigations, to its 
most immovable foundations and inexpugnable 
defenses. None fear the ultimate results save 
those who distrust the real validity and genuine- 
ness of the ground- works of their believing. 

But reason has a further function. That any- 
thing whatever has yet been found in this revela- 
tion which is necessarily contrary to reason I 
have been unable to discover. That much has 
been forced upon it and tortured out of it that is 
wholly opposite to reason and morality and com- 
mon sense is sadly to be affirmed. This has been 
effected, however, by misconception of the design, 
the intent and the nature of the Book which con- 
tains the record ; by torture and violence done it ; 
by ignorance and conceit ; by cruelty and ambi- 
tion. For the explosion of these hideous misin- 
terpretations and misapplications we are indebted 
to the brave and free use of reason often in the 
face of monstrous intolerance and persecution 
even unto death, for the truth's sake. Thanks 
be to God that he has inspired the reason of man 
to fling off* from his revelation of himself a horri- 



164 Reason and Faith 

ble mass of monstrous misunderstandings which 
dark and cruel ages had interposed between him- 
self and the heart of man whom he would redeem, 
— misconceptions which could only alienate all 
rational intelligence from His Word and His Per- 
son. It is to reason, enlightened of God, that we 
owe the tenable defenses of the Book and the 
Gospel in these modern times. 

lyaying these antique absurdities aside as the 
mere curiosities of a dark past, certain things are 
yet objected by many as contrary to sound reason. 
It is said that it is so contrary to reason that a 
good God should suffer the intrusion of evil into 
a moral universe. But the evil is here to a cer- 
tainty. If there be the contradiction, then God 
is not, or is not good. Candor, however, will ad- 
mit that even in these discourses it has been fairly 
shown that the free possibility of evil choices and 
evil performance is essential to the existence of a 
moral universe. 

It is said that for a holy God to justify any 
guilty soul were itself contrary to reason and con- 
science. I believe that consideration of that 
matter has shown with clearness that such a jus- 
tification of the soul which has found through 
Christ a real and genuine repentance is not only 
consistent with reason but demanded by the high- 
est moral reason. 

It is said that the interference of God with the 
ordinary course of nature in the way of miracle 
were contrary to reason. I believe that it has 
been seen that, granted a free personal and ben- 



Reason and Faith 165 

eficent God and a race which needs knowledge 
of Him and His presence and good will, reason, 
instead of rejecting the evidences of such inter- 
vention, even forecasts and demands it. 

It is said that the notion that God would pro- 
vide so strange and costly a redemption for so 
insignificant a race as ours on so petty a planet as 
this is an absurd proposition. The answer is that 
God is love, that this planet is not insignificant, 
and that man, endowed as he is and set out on an 
eternal career for majestic development, is in no 
sense of a contemptible significance, but the 
rather the candidate for the highest of all possi- 
bilities of superb finite moral and spiritual being, 
in these majestic eventualities wholly worthy of 
the wonderful forces and processes of creation, 
providence and redemption. 

With these objections fairly answered, what 
further large and general presumption can lie 
against a rational and restful Christian faith? 
Everything lies in the results of a fair study of 
the evidences of revealed religion in its own fabric 
and in the world's experience of its demonstrated 
effects. 

All the hard and sorrowful mysteries of life are, 
indeed, not solved in these solutions. A fringe of 
as yet insoluble mystery reason itself declares 
must still hang about the secrets of the Divine 
administration of a universe vast and eternal like 
this of which we are a part. All particular in- 
stances in a system of which we know so little 
must go over for their solution to a future when 



1 66 Reason arid Faith 

we shall be better capable of their comprehension. 
Having seen that evil will surely exist in a moral 
universe and that out of it and by agency of it 
is to come the loftiest of conceivable moral and 
spiritual being, sound reason finds no difficulty in 
referring such remnant of present mystery to the 
revealings of the endless future. Indeed it is ob- 
viously best that something, — something much, — 
should be left for a loving faith in and submission 
to such a God as is our God. It were ill for us 
to be ever walking by the sight of our eyes and 
never in need of the vision of a simple trust. 
The horrible conceit, the awful ennui of a man 
who knows everything and all its reasons is intol- 
erable. Life on such terms would get flat, stale 
and unprofitable. Invention, investigation, pro- 
gress would cease and the powers of reason itself 
would die. Reverent reason is content with the 
words of the Master, ' ' What I do thou knowest 
not now but shalt know hereafter, ' ' ought to be 
content and is. It knows now or is set to find 
out all that it can safely manage ! 

So, then, reason has another and a final word. 
These things revealed and believed constitute the 
substance and sanction of all obligation. They 
become the commanding facts and forces of life. 
They are the secret of our creation, enduement 
and preservation. They constitute our oppor- 
tunity, privilege, and Divine prerogative. They 
are our sublime franchise in the universe. By 
this rational faith we are to come to our grandeurs, 
princedoms and great dominions ; to our eternal 



Reason and Faith 167 

beatitudes, likenesses to Christ and to our home 
in His glory and the heart of His love. Holding 
this rational faith it is the sum of all duty — the 
very maundement of the Highest, which we can 
only defy or neglect to the absolute ruin of our 
moral, intellectual, and spiritual being. Such 
neglect or defiance is chaos, anarchy, hell. It is 
the only thing on earth or in hell that is to be 
feared. It is desert of the worst. It is the thing 
against which reason, putting on at last the robes 
of judgment and ascending the throne of con- 
science, pronounces awful sentence. That sentence 
of enthroned reason will be ratified on the Great 
Day before the assembly of the moral universe, in 
the final judgment of Him whose word is 
Destiny ! 

Reason, then, in the Protestant, Christian Faith, 
is to find its freest field, its highest function, its 
perpetual labor and its fullest rest ; is to lift man 
to his final splendor and give to Christ His eternal 
and universal Crown ! Right well did Browning 
sing, 

** I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth or out of it ! " 



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